Sixteen Languages: a journey through 16 programming languages in 361 days

Obligatory contrarian links:

Peter Norvig: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"

  http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Joel Spolsky: "Lord Palmerston on Programming"

  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html

Which is not to say that you can't learn enough about (e.g.) FORTRAN in 16 days to say something about it. But I could probably learn almost as much in 16 minutes by reading a couple of Wikipedia articles and an essay or two.

I don't know FORTRAN myself, but I'm pretty sure the advantages of the language are hard to appreciate unless you're the kind of person who has not only read "Numerical Recipes" cover to cover, but also knows exactly which pages are dead wrong. In other words, you have to be a mathematical physicist whose entire career depends on the quality of your machine's math library. I don't think you can really get into that mindset in 16 days.

He's spending 16 days on each language: Smalltalk, FP, Ada, Python, OCaml, BrainF*, i86 assembly, Prolog, Erlang, Forth, D, Lazy K, Haskell, FORTRAN, Lua, and Scheme.

Everything he writes is in a subversion repository: http://16languages.googlecode.com/svn/

More information on the format: http://16languages.blogspot.com/2007/09/rules.html