C# 3.5
I enjoy coding in C# 3.5 and leveraging the extensive .NET framework. Interfaces, Reflection and Generics are very powerful tools for implementing flexible, strongly typed framework designs. The recent introduction of lambda expressions is a welcome borrow from other languages, it promotes functional programming to a first class paradigm. LINQ has added valuable constructs for building query expressions.
VS2008, ReSharper and TestDriven.NET make a very powerful IDE with great intelli-sense, refactoring, debugging and testing tools.
Posts tagged C#
Python/IronPython
Python is the first modern scripting language I’ve been exposed to, I think its an amazing language that really is fun to use. Its such a simple, logical, flexible and explorable language. For example, I found it fascinating that behind the scenes scopes are just standard Python dictionaries of object which you access and change with code. Sure that gives plenty of ways to break a script, but restricting users control of the languages internal workings is not the Python way. Its a language that allows you to do almost anything, but still fully supporting the standard programming paradigms. IronPython on the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime it up to version 2 and is an exciting new way to build on the .NET framework.
Post tagged Python
JavaScript
I enjoy writing Javascript despite some of its quirky scoping. I feel it’s a deceptively powerful language which is vindicated by modern libraries and APIs like JQuery and Google Maps providing a new way of thinking about manipulating the DOM and interacting with servers. JSON serializers on the .NET framework have made passing dynamic data to JavaScript a breeze.
Posts tagged JavaScript
ActionScript
I've only used ActionScript for a programming in Flash which I haven't done much of. I don't have much to say about the language other than it feels a lot like programming in JavaScript.
Posts tagged ActionScript
XSL
XSL is a fantastic language for transforming data and is a very useful technology in many software systems. I believe it needs to be limited to transforming data though, it's a terrible language for implementing too much logic. I worked on Java a web application using Struts and an XSL view engine. While I think its pretty neat as view engine, it got horribly complicated and difficult to debug when too much logic was pushed into XSL.
C
C is a great language for describing low level computer operation. Infinitely more readable, writable and manageable than assembly language yet compilers produce very predictable assembly. I although I haven’t used it much recently, I’ve spent many hours coding Atmal microcontrollers on my SDK500.