Welcome to my commonplace blog

The goal of this blog is to preserve a few ideas and quotes from books I read. In the old days when books were not so readily available, people kept "commonplace books" where they copied choice passages they wanted to be able to remember and perhaps reuse. The idea got picked up by V.F.D. and it's common knowledge that most of that organization's volunteers have kept commonplace books, and so have Laura and I.

I'm sure there are many other Internet sites and blogs dedicated to the same idea. But this one is mine. Feel free to look around and leave comments, but not spam.

11 July 2011

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. Tate

Buy from The Pragmatic Programmer and you can get paper or several non-DRMd e-versions, including Kindle/Mobi, ePub and PDF.

An introduction to Ruby, Prolog, IO, Erlang, Haskel, Clojure (a dialect of Lisp) and Scala, with emphasis on learning different ways to express programming concepts and having fun while doing it. I have always believed that a broad knowledge of programming language with a working knowledge of at least a handful of them will make a better programmer. This book is in the same mindset. If you read everything and follow the assignments, you will know enough to write toy programs in each of the languages, a good foundation to build on.


Quotes:

Ruby is a great language for getting a viable product to market quickly. Second, the scalability of Ruby is limited in some ways.

In Io, everything is a message that returns another receiver. There are no keywords and only a handful of characters that behave like keywords.

Static typing is a natural fit for functional programming languages, but Java-style static typing for object-oriented systems is a deal with the devil.

The Erlang mantra is “Let it crash.”

Concurrency hurts, not because it is inherently difficult but because we’ve been using the wrong programming model!

Scala does not define precedence on operators. It defines precedence on methods.

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