Tuesday, March 01, 2005

As if I haven't learnt enough programming languages..

As much as I enjoy programming in Python and feel it is the closet fit for how my brain works, I still have the need to checkout other languages.

After listening to Dr Chris Wright at OSDC last year, I made a mental note to checkout Scheme and also learn about continuations. After finding some tutorials on the web, I started playing with PyScheme It was great for trying out simple examples and made me interested enough for something to try out more complex things. I found Dr Scheme which is an interactive, integrated, graphical programming environment for the Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd programming languages. It is multi-platform running on Windows (95 and up), Mac OS X, and Unix/X. It has great interactive syntax checking which is very helpful when debugging complex scheme code. There is even talk of a plug-in that will allow you to use the tool to program in Python called PLT Spy

At work I needed to check that some web services for our financial app worked when called from .NET As we currently only support RPC style, writing WS clients in C# is not much fun. I really needed an agile programming language. I could have used PythonNet but really wanted to try out a CLI language. As IronPython seems to be going nowhere, I decided to try out Boo Since some of the syntax is based on Python, I feel at home using it. And based on one days use, it makes working in .NET fun.

1 comment:

alang said...

Yes, the MS Win platform can be great gobs of fun, especially when you're doing things that are very specific to Windows - Excel, Access etc. Love to hear how Boo turns out.