In this group we'll make our way through the book "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages," by Bruce Tate. It's a quick deep-dive into seven very different languages: Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell.

I know almost nothing about these languages myself -- I'm a JavaScript guy with some very limited exposure to Ruby -- and do not expect to become an expert in any of them overnight, but I am excited to dive into paradigms I know nothing about (like logic programming in Prolog and concurrency programming in Erlang) and gain the confidence to be able to approach any new language and see what makes it tick.

The book is designed to be consumed in seven weekends, but I figured what with all our full-time jobs and side projects, not to mention lives outside of programming, meeting once a month might be a more reasonable pace. And of course you can drop in on any of the sessions even if you are starting in the middle or have skipped a few, because each meeting will be about a completely different language, and thus more or less self-contained.

So if you want to join me, whatever your experience level,* come on down!

*A NOTE FOR BEGINNERS:

I feel it's important to point out that this book was not exactly written for beginners. As the author says in the introduction, "Buy this book if you are a competent programmer who wants to grow." If you don't have experience programming in at least one language, you can count on being confused.

So, you have been warned.

That being said, I totally encourage you to come to these meetups anyway. We (meaning me and all the other people who have signed up that I happen to know already) are a friendly bunch, and some of us (well, me anyway) spent a lot of time in the fairly recent past at meetups where we understood 10% of what the speaker said. You keep going, you get inspired by the people you meet, you study and create projects on your own, and one day you realize that you're understanding over half of what's going on.

From that point on, the rest is a lot less intimidating.