I really like the idea of testing a language by writing a small command-line utility with it, even one that -- as the author mentioned -- already exists.
Way back when, when I first was learning C, I didn't comprehend it very well. I was OK with it. A friend gave me some CDs with FreeBSD on it, one with the OS, and one with program sources. It was that source code which really opened my eyes, and you could digest small programs (like chmod) and see, you know, this is working, production code, and it's not hard, and you can do this.
Way back when, when I first was learning C, I didn't comprehend it very well. I was OK with it. A friend gave me some CDs with FreeBSD on it, one with the OS, and one with program sources. It was that source code which really opened my eyes, and you could digest small programs (like chmod) and see, you know, this is working, production code, and it's not hard, and you can do this.