Pragmatic Programmer has published Bruce Tate's Seven Languages. I have some reservations.
The languages are Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Looks cool. But look again.
Clojure is something of a Lisp reincarnate. Io and Ruby are botrh Smalltalk in another guise: Ruby is Smalltalk in files à la Perl; Dekorte's Io is Smalltalk-2 (Self) + actor (but not morphic - for which see one brand of Squeak Smalltalk.)
Erlang is best understood as Prolog reduced. So what would have been beyond 1974 Prolog? Oz. Or Mercury. Or XSB. Or think outside the box with a chapter on Logtalk instead.
Scala Traits come from Squeak Smalltalk, btw.
I have no quarrel with Haskell being there, though some would argue for OCaml.
But if LISP is not there, what is Prolog doing there? Why not JESS or Drools instead? And not a single expression-based language (Rebol, ICON/UNICON ( and now ObjectIcon and Converge) or MIT Curl, the language (ww.curl.com.)
With Ruby there, we at least have a reminder that performance matters - so maybe it should have been JRuby. But I can imagine how Pythonists might feel incensed.
I would suggest 12 languages in 12 months or 3 languages in 3 months.
Take a moment to look at the comments on the Prolog N-Queens code. Is Tate claiming that the two files in question are his copyrighted code? Compare the ICON code for N-Queens and ask whether you wouldn't be better looking there for an alternative language on your shelf. And Rebol 3 is really starting to take shape over at Rebol.net, Rebol.org and Rebol.com
Most CS folks recall the course in which they were required to do some Prolog. But would they skip a chapter on JESS or Logtalk?
The real story in Prolog in the past 25 years is constraint resolution, and that can be seen best in Oz. But the reader will have to use emacs. Oops.
I don't mean to knock Amzi! Prolog for Eclipse or many of the excellent Prolog projects such as swi-prolog.org (now with UNICODE and constraint-handling rules) but I would argue that what makes SWI interesting is Logtalk - and if there is RDF in the picture, that points to XSB.
Clojure, Haskell, Io, XSB, Scala, Erlang, JESS and JRuby in 8 weeks. Ok, now I'm more likely to recommend a book.
"Clojure, F#, Io, Oz, Scala, Erlang, and JRuby in 7 months". Call it "between vacations reading-and-testing-and-coding-and-designing". And you would have my attention.
And whatever became of Tcl ( it only gave us Tk, Expect, Sqlite and now TclOO.) Oops.
Oh, and Mercury now generates Erlang in addition to C or Java.
PS
Isn't concurrency coming to UNICON? Isn't Oz now distributed Oz? Isn't ObjectIcon at code.google.com/p/objecticon
Oh - right. The cool factor. And Smalltalk itself - after giving us so much and then the RefactoringBrowser and then UnitTest and pair-programming and eXtreme Programming and the wiki at c2.com ... is not yet cool again. Might as well wait for Hermes2 on a non-Linux OS.
Oh - and Rebol is already PEG-equivalent at 300+ Kb core running with a claim to a whole 15 Mb of working memory. Hmmm.
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Great to see a new post. It's rare to find someone with such enthusiasm for both philosophy and programming despite the complementary insights they can provide.
I promised myself I would hold to just mastering Squeak/Seaside for the time being, but then I stumbled on this ;p. I've been eyeballing the Mozart system and this just re-piqued my interest. It also turns out a local college library has the Peter van Roy book you mentioned in an old post. I may just have to go investigate.
What's hermes2 by the way? I dug around a bit, but didn't see much. Is it related to a Scala project involving Cassandra?
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