Erlang day two wasn't quite as swearing free as Erlang day one. You see I tend to swear when I’m stuck or baffled by syntax. And I git stuck a bit on the bonus problem. Turns out that putting []s round my variable made everything turn out nice. Who knew?Day two looks at branching, anony …

Bruce Tate introduces Erlang as making hard things easy and easy things hard. Which isn't entirely fair I guess, given that the things it makes hard are hard for good reason. Mutability is hard, but something to be avoided in concurrent systems, which is the area where Erlang's sweet spot is loca …

Day three and I’m now sort of getting the hang of Scala. Either that or the excercise is easier! I think that in learning about the neat text processing tricks that Scala allows, it helped me to click with it a bit more than in previous days. I’ve also started to get more used to the ty …

It all seemed so straightforward at first. And it was. Until I needed to split an array into key value pairs for the second excercise. I spent about two hours trying to find a nice way f doing that. I’m not entirely happy with the way I came up with, but it works at least.The scala synta …

Tate compares Scala to Edward Scissorhands in his metaphorical introduction to the chapter. What I’ve seen of the language so far certainly made me feel it was a little on the odd side. Its just near enough to Java that it feels wrong when it works more Rubyishly or more Lispishly. The first …

My fears of a mega hardcore third day of prolog were not realised, and I actually had some proper fun this time round. Mr. Tate is absolutely right that making a sudoku solver the prolog way is almost magical. I’ve written sudoke solvers in perl before. And believe me it ain't pretty. With …

Day Two was challenging. Like really hard. My imperative mindset is finding the declarative approach to coding frankly odd. When things do work it feels almost magical. And in at least one of the solutions I just chanced upon the implementation by fiddling round pretyy randomly rather than having a …

Its been a long time since I finished the Io section of my Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Journey. I realize that. Probably six months. That is doubleplus ungood. In my defence I must remind readers that I said at the outset that I might not do these on seven consecutive weeks. I’m just stret …

It all looked so easy, especially after the monster list of assignments on Io, day two. Well, appearances can be deceptive it seems. The place where I got stuck was on question three. Try as I might I couldn't override the colon operator as I wanted to do. It worked fine on the commandline. No pr …

Wow. Day two messed with my head. I woke up a bit tired this morning to have a crack at it and got really baffled by how to make a fibonacci sequence. Just drew a total blank. So, I dug out some old c code I had and copied that into io. Which is sort of cheating, but got me going and also helped …