Taken out today: The Dharma Bums
The counts: Development: 4; Other: 5; SQL: 1; WILY: 2
Line of the day: A scientist builds in order to learn; an
engineer learns in order to build.
Post of the day:
Punch it in the nose - if it stops bleeding, punch it harder
Honorable fortune cookie say: The windmills are winning.
What is Take Outs? Check out the
FAQ here.
Jason Zander, PUM for the CLR, asked our opinions about dynamic languages and the CLR. Maybe I'm showing myself as a rube by saying this, but I just want to be able to use the language as a tool, not a philosophy.
There's a place for dynamic languages that run-on-the-run-time. I've blogged in the past about Perl vs. VB.Net and commented a few of times it would be nice to have a meaningful Perl.NET for shell apps. That's not because Perl itself is so great (it is, though), but because its the tool that I already know and that is best at the tasks I used it for. Heck, I've used Perl.NET for Web Services, too. But, practically, I wouldn't write a database-facading service with Perl, but I don't want to write log file parsers with C# either. I think there are a lot of "Morts like me" that would use dynamic-but-CLR-hosted languages more if there was better Studio Integration and the bits were, essentially, OSSed. I'd use them too, but unlike Jim, I wouldn't bother inventing them.
The real value being demonstrated is making the CLR more hostable. That's the kind of stuff I want to see efforts going into. I want MS to do more of. Please, do to Exchange what you've done with SQL "Yukon" next. And make VBA go away too. While I don't know if you could actually host the CLR in Access, making rid of DAO and ADO would make me smile. A lot.
Then there is the whole Rotor/Mono aspect. Stuff like IronPython will get the attention of lots of folks using "the other platform" and see the value in the CLR. I'd love to see a comparison done of Parrot to Mono to CLR. The Parrot FAQ says the CLR isn't a suitable target for Perl6. Why? I'm going to ask them that question...
So, yes, Jason, there is value in this investment. At the same time, I really don't want to see 5th/6th generation languages like X# get derailed by efforts like this. The idea of having set-based types and operations in a static language is very appealing to me for business reasons: faster development of more sustainable applications.
FWIW, There's a not-to-surprising dearth of information on the LCG topic vis-a-vis Yukon. While I'd like to know more, that'd be like learning how to count the exact number of hairs left on my head: predictive of when I'll finally go bald, but not overly practical in my work-a-day world.
Jay Hannah, our local PerlMonger leader, pointed us to:
http://planet.perl.org/ (RSS Feed)
Well, its like a Junkies site, but its dedicated to my favorite programming language: Perl. In particular, Jay pointed out Maypole and a little app written by Simon Cozen to track his ale consumptions. Its not that its a trivial app, but it strikes me as significant in that even the OSS communities are starting to get into low-code applications.