Background: I stumbled across the author's blog post announcing his intention to write the book while looking for materials comparing language paradigms instead of particular languages (object-oriented, logical, functional, prototype, etc). The as yet unwritten book sounded like exactly what I was after (thus my enthusiastic anticipation). I purchased an electronic copy of this book from the Prag Press beta program about six months ago and began reading the chapters as they were completed and released. My paper copy just arrived from Amazon today. Thus I can comment on the whole content of the book and the physical object.

Languages: While the languages covered (Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell) are excitingly (painfully?) trendy the list is not without merit. In the introduction the author explains that he arrived at the list by asking readers and edited from there: swapping Io for JavaScript and excluding Python thereby making room for Prolog. One could... Read more

I was very disappointed in this book. I could have attain a similar level of depth with fewer unnecessary film-based analogies by reading each langauges' wikipedia page.

The author focuses heavily on syntax, program structure, and how common things are represented in each language, what the REPL, looks like in each case, etc. There many belabored explanations of well-understood language-agnostic concepts like prototypes, actors, futures, recursion, laziness, and immutability. Zero of these languages are interesting because of how lists work yet the book laboriously visits this example over and over. Similarly, only one or two of the languages has truly interesting things to say about concurrency, but he discusses concurrency over and over.

Each of these languages has made important contributions to the field of programming language design and culture. This is where the time should be spent--not developing a familiarity with basics like syntax and list operations... Read more

The idea is good - have a brief overview of several programming languages that gather most curiosity in the community. The languages that made it to the book were chosen by the people the author asked beforehand.

Each language is given 3 days worth of chapters. First day is for a = b, second is for [a] = [b] and the third is for "real stuff". About two thirds of the book are therefore dedicated to simple variable assignments, number literals, containers (lists mostly), and control structures such as if's.

And herein lies the problem - although great to know that in language X assignment goes like

console> plz let a be 1
a nowz 1!!!oneone
console>

but what does it tell about the language ?

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I'm confident that this material will capture the spirit of each programming language pretty well...
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I don't think it happened. It would be possible if the author had spent years working in... Read more