The 12in23 calendar

Hi everyone,

We’ve been blown away by the response to #12in23. Thousands of you have started the challenge and some of you have already completed it - which is an amazing achievement!

I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you what we’ve got planned for the rest of the year and give you the opportunity to participate even further!

The first thing to know is that we’re going to have a theme for each month where we encourage you to explore a certain paradigm, type of programming, maybe a specific point in time - for example trying really old languages or really new ones.

During that month we’re going to be streaming people chatting about that month’s theme, solving exercises in various featuredlanguages, and just trying to push as much interesting, useful content your way as possible! If you’d like to get involved in this, please reach out to us - see the link in the description.

Also, before I dig into what the year is going to look like, please hit subscribe so that you don’t miss any of the content as we release it through the year!

OK! So we’ve put together a calendar that contains every one of the tracks on Exercism. Which was not an easy feat! I’ll walk you through what we’re going to do!

The months

So, first up we have Functional February, in which we’re exploring functional languages! We’ve just put the intro video for this together and I’m really excited to dig into this. Functional languages are super interesting and fun and teach you loads. There’s lots of functional languages but if you don’t know where to start, we’re specifically recommending trying Elixir, F# or Gleam.

Next we have Mechanical March, in which we’re looking at more system-programming type languages. These are languages like C++ or Go or Nim. Things that tend to compile to machine code, might have some memory management for you to think about, or make you consider how the code is executed. Languages that get you a bit closer to the innards of what’s going on with the computer.

For Analytical April we’re focussing on more sciency languages. The two big ones here are Python and Julia, but we also have a great R track. Obviously something like Python can go in lots of categories, but we think that the majority of non-beginners are learning it for its value as a data-science technology right now so we’ve put it here!

May is going to be a fun one and we’ve called it Mindshifting May! We’re highlighting languages that do something different. Our favourite example of this is Prolog, which is a quite unique way to program but we’ll also be looking at Rust, TCL, and Unison - a very new language that takes a different approach to distributed programming that we’re excited and intrigued about.

Into June and we’re taking a northern hemisphere approach to naming and calling this the Summer of Sexps. We’ll be exploring expression-based languages - focussing specifically on Common Lisp and Clojure, two great Exercism tracks! If you’ve never tried a Lisp, this will be a really fun month for you. And rather than being scared of the parentheses, you’ll come to appreciate them!

As we move into July, we’re going old school for Jurassic July. We’re exploring old languages - those languages that have provided foundations for programming we know today. Think Fortran, COBOL, VB and C. If you’re a relative newcomer to programming, it might intrigue and shock you to see what coding used to be like!

August is a month that will contain languages familiar to any of you as we focus on building websites and Apps. We’ll be looking at languages like JavaScript, Kotlin and Swift, but also some less well-used ones like Dart. We’ll also look at languages such as ABAP which are used for very specific purposes.

Slimline September focusses on languages in which you can do a lot while typing very little. The sort of languages that people might use to play code golf! Think Perl, AWK, JQ and Bash. These languages can feel somewhat esoteric the first time you use them, but they are super-powerful ways to be productive if you put the effort into learning them. And also fun for your brain to explore!

Month 10 is Object Oriented October. We’re exploring languages which focus heavily on Object Oriented Programming - languages like Ruby and C#, and lesser known languages like Crystal and Pharo. If you’ve always wanted to go deep into exploring OOP, this is the month for you!

Our final themed month is Nibbly November - a month dedicated to the lowest level languages where you’ll be manipulating bits and bytes. We’re focussing on two languages: x86-assembly, the language that probably underpins the hardware you’re watching this on, and WebAssembly, the new kid on the block that allows you to run any programming language in your web browser. This won’t be an easy month, but will potentially be the most satisfying to achieve!

Which brings us finally to December Diversions. These are the languages that we couldn’t fit anywhere else! Things like Groovy, Lua and Wren. Think of this as a wildcard month - you can choose anything you like to finish off the year in style!

So that’s it - a year of new programming languages for you to explore and have fun with. Leave a comment on the video telling us what you’re excited to try! And if you’d like to stream yourself solving some exercises, please reach out to us and we’ll try to raise awareness of what you’re doing, and maybe even feature you on one of our official channels!

Thanks for reading :)