In my post looking forward to 2008, I mentioned that I wanted to take more time this year to learn new technologies, particularly outside of the Microsoft communities. With all of the push in .NET towards dynamic languages right now, why not look to some of the dynamic languages that have been out there being used for years?

I know what you're thinking - looks like David here decided to learn Ruby. I mean, that's what everyone is using, right? Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Nahhh, I'm actually learning Python! Probably the key factor for me was the Python Challenge. I follow MoW's Powershell blog and he's started up a series on working through the Python Challenge using Powershell. I had heard about the challenge before, but hadn't really looked into it much, but this was enough to prompt me to get over there and try it out. (I am planning on still learning Ruby, though - I'll just go through the challenges with Ruby later)

I resisted the urge to try to find an IDE for Python and just code it up in a text editor. It has forced me to get more familiar with the syntax as a result. The Python site has a great tutorial for starters as well as some good documentation on the available modules. The hardest part for me is to not write the code like I write C# or VB. For one of the challenges, you have to take a given string, a given mapping, and then translate the string to get the instructions to move to the next challenge. I wrote a basic loop over the characters in the string, converted them to their ordinal values, performed the translation, and then converted them back to characters. It worked, but it wasn't the best way to do it in Python. Python provides this great function called string.maketrans. Also, the map function is amazing. It is sort of like the List<T>.ForEach method except that it reads a lot better (though lambda expressions in C# make it a little better). I'm starting to understand the power behind the whole map/reduce idea that Google is so big on. List comprehensions are really cool, too.

Anyway, so far, I'm to the 5th challenge (with some help from Google, the Python tutorials, and the challenge forums at times) and it is pretty cool. One of the most enlightening things about going through the challenge is that, as you complete one, you can go look at submitted solutions on the wiki. It is a great way to evaluate if you solved the challenge the "right" way or not. It is a great learning experience. One way I'm trying to apply this knowledge is that I'm running the challenges in both CPython (Python that runs on C, the standard I think) and IronPython.

Another thing I've done to try to see how other development communities work is that I've installed Ubuntu 8.04 (the alpha) on my laptop. I'm now dual booting Vista x64 and Ubuntu and it is pretty nice. I have two favorite things about Ubuntu so far - the ridiculous customization that you can do with it (compiz is amazing) and the package manager. Seriously, the fact that you don't have to pull up a browser to download apps and install them is a massive plus over Windows. In fact, you can just run a simple apt-get command if you want. Don't worry, though, I'm not planning on switching from Vista anytime, soon. Ubuntu is great and I'll be keeping it on the laptop, but I still like Vista, too. Right, right, blasphemy, I know. They're both great operating systems as far as I'm concerned. One takes an entire DVD and seems like a resource hog (not as bad anymore) and the other fits on a CD and requires editing conf files, downloading "restricted" drivers, and sitting at the command line to get video and wireless working Seriously, neither are perfect. It has been nice seeing both sides of the fence, though.

In case you've been under a rock recently, Visual Studio 2008 was released recently which supports a lot of functional capabilities like lambda expressions. I've been playing around with the lambda syntax in both C# and VB.NET recently and the addition to the languages is great. I did run into one thing that is still frustrating me in VB.NET, though.

Check out the below C# snippet:

TryTimes(() =>
{
   Console.WriteLine("hi there.");
   throw new Exception("haha");
   Console.WriteLine("hi there after   .");
}, 5);

This is the prototype for the usage of a function that could try an operation a certain number of times and then fail if the operation didn't succeed after N number of tries. Obviously, the above code sample will fail every time, but the idea could work alright for file I/O if you're unsure if anyone else might have locks on the file.

The above is impossible to do in VB.NET, though, because VB.NET does not support multi-line lambda expressions. The C# supports them by wrapping the expressions in curly braces, essentially making the lambda expression a block. I wanted to emulate the same thing with VB.NET, but after some fruitless web searches, I came across this MSDN forum posting on VB.NET and lambdas which then pointed to Paul Vick's post on the VB 2008 features that are still in.

I've been wanting the equivalent of anonymous delegates in VB for a long time and I thought, with lambda expressions, I might finally get them. We are a lot closer, but they still don't provide quite the benefit that they could have had we gotten multi-line lambda support. I guess those annoying line continuation characters in VB mess this all up. I think if I could change anything about VB, it would be to make those optional.

On the positive side, though, the intellisense support for VB.NET has increased substantially. For that, I am thankful.

I was looking through programming.reddit.com today and discovered that IronLisp now has a website on Codeplex. I haven't coded in LISP since college, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

This got me thinking - how many Iron* projects are there now? This is what I've come up with:

1) IronPython - the original Iron project?

2) IronRuby

3) IronLisp

4) IronXSLT - (thanks Michael!)

5) ...

Hmmm... as I was thinking about this blog post, I seemed to think there were a lot more out there. I know there are a lot of other languages that support the CLR, but I guess the Iron designation seems to be fitting with the languages that are build on top of the DLR. I'm a little curious if the Smalltalk/DLR implementation (Vista Smalltalk) will make the name change to IronSmalltalk or not.

So where did the Iron naming scheme come from anyway? Why not Nython¹ or NRuby²?

¹ - The Java implementation is Jython.

² - The Java implementation is JRuby.