Seven Languages in Seven Months

I finished reading my copy of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks last month.  I've been stewing on it a bit as I've started to dig into Code Complete 2.  Haskell, Clojure, and Erlang were by far the hardest languages to grok, even when compared to the venerable Prolog and obscure Io.  Tate's choice to place them at the end of the book was well advised, as many of the ideas gracefully intersect in later languages.  In particular I felt like the Prolog unification sections played nicely into some of the functional languages.

Clojure does feel like a decent next step for the JVM, but I still enjoyed Scala much more. I'm also not a fan of the name since I'm just getting my head around closures. Erlang was an interesting language, but I'm not sure what I'd program in it. That's probably an effect from my lack of experience in the concurrent paradigm. I felt that Haskell had a somewhat superficial treatment in the book, particularly the concept of monads. This was a language I was expecting to be blown away by, but partial functions don't seem to add much from a cursory exploration (if you already have first class functions).

Code Complete 2 is a very different book, both in content and in style.  I find myself enjoying it a lot less, even though the information provided on formal development process is something I probably need to commit to memory.  I'm still committed to reading it for now, but I hope that it picks up later on since it is a pretty thick book.

I'm working on a "Intro to Java" presentation to given in two weeks at LaunchMemphis.  I've already picked out a "textbook" in the form of the tutorials from Oracle.  They seem to be the only documentation that is up to date since the release of Java 7. I'm still contemplating what will be my "advanced" demo after the traditional "Hello, World" app. I'm tempted to see if I can get a CRUD app running on Heroku with the Play framework, since I expect a fair number of web developers to attend.  I'm afraid that may be too many moving parts.  Also my experience with the Play framework is non-existent right now.

If you have any suggestions or requests for demos or content please leave them in the comments. Thanks!