Seven Languages in Seven Weeks!

Group discussion of the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate. Languages covered are Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. What are the driving forces in each language's design? Why were these languages covered, and how are they positioned in the programming language ecosystem? How do they compare with others, or with your favorite language on features like expressiveness, run time, execution time, ease of concurrent & parallel execution, testing, verification, deployment, etc? (Comparison matrix?) Perhaps this will help you see new possibilities for patterns in those languages you use regularly.

Reading the book beforehand is encouraged, but obviously not required.

If you'd like to do a mini-presentation on one of these languages, feel free to post a note on the discussion page for this meeting.