Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

Foreword

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 ...