Chapter 8
Wrapping Up

Hopefully, you’ve made it through another seven languages in seven weeks. In the foreword, José Valim compared walking through these seven languages to the beginning of your own journey. This particular trip has taken you through diverse programming models, including Factor’s concatenative style, Elm’s reactive programming, Lua’s prototypes, miniKanren’s combination of logic and functional techniques, and various takes on functional programming.

Some will try to tell you that this journey is worthless, that you can’t truly learn a language in seven days any more than you can learn Italian by eating at the Olive Garden once a week. If you’ve worked through these exercises, you know different. Traveling for the sake of traveling is not worthless. True, on your brief trip you’ve not yet accumulated the fluency of a permanent resident, but you have been there. The books in this series are designed to give you quick immersions in the community that will leave more than a passing, shallow impression. You’ve done things, from building a game to telling a story with code. As José says, the lessons will be different for each reader.

As a programmer, you’ll never be more than the sum of your experiences. Any journey will leave lingering impressions of the steps along the path. Let’s take a few moments to reinforce those images so they become a more permanent part of our mental toolbox. For now, I’d like to think about that journey as a passage through time.