Exploring Languages Feb 25, 2011 01:38
I think it's required to explore various programming languages from time to time. After dedicating myself to Ruby and loving it for the last couple of years, I've started to look at a few other languages that have been out for a while.
There are a log of interesting languages out there (io, erlang, closure). And just today, I heard about two languages being built on the Rubinius VM: Fancy and the rewrite of Atomo. Very interesting indeed. All of these languages are interesting, but I've decided to focus on two mainstream-ish languages that have piqued my interest most: Scala and Lua. I haven't dug in too much, but I just wanted to write about why I find these languages interesting.
Scala runs on the JVM and is an interesting blend of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming paradigms. Scala looks like a better Java. It's modern, it's clean and it actually has a design point of view. Scala's been used at Twitter to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the backend. Regardless of what you think about Twitter's infamous fail whale, it's been reliable lately and their engineering team deserves to be recognized for their work.
Just a quick word about Java: I've never really liked it. I think Java's design decisions have been guided by a certain academic consistency and a watered down least common denominator approach that makes it boring and tedious to code. What is quite impressive though is the huge infrastructure of Java code and the JVM. I have done some JRuby work to leverage some Java libraries and that worked very well, the performance was terrific and I quite like Jetty as an HTTP platform. There's a reason why Jetty has been chosen by so many industry leaders. The JVM has turned out to be as multi-language as .NET's CLR. Go figure.
Lua is pretty surprising to me. It's been around for a while and used in the gaming community for a while now, but I recently took notice when @ezmobius and @zedshaw tweeted about it. I've heard good things about it before, so I took a look. I really liked what I saw. It's got a good set of libraries and has proven itself over the years. I purchased the lua book and I'm looking forward to hacking around with it.
So that's it, I hope to build some interesting stuff using these languages soon.
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