Bruce Tate - Seven more languages in seven weeks: languages that are shaping the future

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Back in 2010, I was deeply troubled. The growing list of difficulties in writing concurrent software was nagging at me. The tools I had at hand were clunky, and none of them provided a mental model that helped me reason about the problems I was facing.

I decided it was time for a change.

However, out of the hundreds of programming languages out there, how could I possibly find one that fit my criteria? How could I even filter this huge set into a smaller one that I could explore in more detail? Then I found that someone had decided to tell the exact story I wanted to hear: Bruce Tate had just written Seven Languages in Seven Weeks , which explored Ruby, Io, Prolog, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, and Haskell.

I was familiar with many of the languages in Seven Languages in Seven Weeks but the book did more than just introduce programming language constructs. It introduced their philosophy, community, and thinking models. To me, the book was telling a story about concurrency, and as I read the book, a very clear picture about immutability, threads, futures, actors, software transactional memory, and more was being painted.

Once I finished the book, I knew exactly which languages and paradigms I wanted to explore next. I bought a heap of books about Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell and I also started writing code right away.

Months later, though, I still hadnt found one language that fit all my criteria. I wanted the robustness and distribution of the Erlang VM, but I also wanted the metaprogramming and polymorphism from Clojure alongside a syntax I was comfortable with. Thats when I decided to create the Elixir programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine.

Now, four years later, Elixir is one of the languages covered in Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks .

The interesting thing is that the first book was not a story about concurrency but thats how I read it. Seven Languages in Seven Weeks , as any other excellent book, gives space for the reader to include her own experiences as part of the story, allowing each reader to learn different lessons and, in this particular case, choose other languages to explore next.

This is what makes Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks even more ambitious. Many of the languages in the book are relatively new and in active development, which brings a whole new range of ideas and lessons to be learned. It also opens up the possibility for readers to pick their next languages and not only master them but become part of the language development itself.