The smart folks over at Pragmatic Programmers have done it yet again… I’ve bought another book from them; this time it’s Programming Erlang in the wonderful Beta Book format — how wonderful is it that we developers, mostly an impatient lot to begin with, now don’t even have to wait for a book to be published to start reading?.

Back a few years ago (2002, it seems), I took part in the Language of the Year project, and it really changed my feelings about language learning. Someone that had always been interested in languages, be they natural or … unnatural, I’d already been bouncing around from one programming language to another, but I had this slightly erking feeling that it was a bad idea and that it made me a bad developer. After all, couldn’t I just stick with anything? Was I destined to be a mere dilettante, completely without “professional” focus?

After LOTY, I felt completely vindicated. Through the experience, I came to fully appreciate the reason I love to learn new languages, and how valuable allowing myself to try them out can be. It’s made me a much better developer than if I had just put my head down and let Ruby fill my entire universe — what a shame it would have been without Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, OCaml, Io, Lua, Self, et al to help me see the different approaches, new possibilities, and beautiful variations in technique that I’ve been able to incorporate into my problem solving process, code, and outlook!

So, it’s time to revisit Erlang for a bit (along with several others I’ve spoken to recently and read), and nothing makes me more happy at this moment than finding the perfect book to help.