I just got an email announcing “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks” from the Pragmatic Programmers. This is exactly the kind of book that calls to me. Man, it would be so cool to learn 7 languages at a more than superficial level. My problem is that I have ideas for 7 projects that would actually be more productive than learning 7 languages. I might buy the book and not read it or buy it and read part of it before realizing I should be working on finishing one of my projects or buy it read all of it and go back to the projects I should have been working on… See that’s why I hate these kind of books, I want them and I can justify them, but I don’t know if they are really valuable for me.

On a secondary note, this book highlights a new problem for me now that I will soon have an iPad. The electronic version of the book is $22 and the print version at Amazon is $23. I want the electronic version for its convenience, but this is also the type of book which I would likely sell and that just can’t be done with an electronic version. If the electronic version were around $15, it’d be easy. At nearly identical price points it’s a tough call.

I started working through the Lift getting started guide and other documentation and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the benefits of using Lift aren’t applicable to the project. The project is a Facebook app and I have a little experience writing those with Django and Google App Engine. All the nice CRUD, AJAX, JSON, Comet, etc. integration isn’t going to help me. Also, there aren’t a whole lot of examples of using Lift with Facebook. In fact, my biggest concern with using Lift would be the lack of documentation. There is “The Lift Book” but this is more a guide to what Lift can do and how to do it. There are a few tutorial floating around, but the ones I found were out of date and incomplete. I’ve come to realize that I learn best by working through examples and there just aren’t enough of those to make me want to move forward with Lift.

I’ve decided to go with Django on Google App Engine for this project. It’s somewhat familiar ground and will allow me to focus more on building the app rather than learning a framework and language. Although I’m not well versed enough in Django, Python, Google App Engine, and Facebook to believe I won’t learn a whole lot.

I’ve decided to start my project using Scala and Lift. I installed them by following this quick tutorial. My next step is to fire it up under Eclipse.

After my experience with Groovy and Grails, I’ve been thinking about what to do next. I’ve got an idea for an iPhone application, a Facebook game idea to research, and a Flash game concept I’d like to flesh out. While wandering about the internet to help me decide on what to work on, I came across the blog “ONE DIV ZERO” by James Iry. He’s a programmer and does a lot of work with Scala and he really knows his stuff. Some of the specifics are over my head at this point, but reading through his posts has been an education. His post “Erlang Style Actors Are All About Shared State” was awesome. He has me seriously thinking about diving into Scala. Scala also has an associated web framework called Lift. Its creator, David Pollak, has a great post entitled “Web Framework Manifesto.” Having bright guys like them in a community is a real plus.