Learning multiple languages (question for general discussion)

[Paul Rubin]

aleax at mail.comcast.net (Alex Martelli) writes:
> I can't imagine NOT getting enthusiastic and stimulated by reading Van
> Roy and Hariri's book -- it IS quite as good and readable as SICP.

It's been on my want-to-read list for a long time.  I have the
downloaded draft edition (from before the print edition came out) and
it looks quite good.  The Oz language has some interesting approaches.

> Ruby's also blessed with good books (and the excellent Rails, too).

I haven't been terribly interested in Ruby; it may have a more
rigorous OO approach than Python, but Smalltalk already did that
decades ago.  So Ruby seems like yet another Perl-like language.  Am I
missing something?

Do you have any opinion of "Types and Programming Languages" by
Pierce?  Autrijus Tang (the guy who started PUGS, the Perl 6
implementation in Haskell) raves about it in an interview, and another
guy I know recommended it too, but I haven't actually looked at a copy
yet (stores I've looked in don't have it).  Haskell is the language
that I guess interests me the most these days (in terms of learning
new ones), but I haven't yet attempted doing anything with it.