A few days ago I pontificated on my need to choose a new “Language of the Year.” Right now I’m attempting to choose between Scala and Clojure. If nothing else, I’ve learned from this exercise that asking the community for feedback is a GOOD thing. Your comments have been very helpful.
To summarize:
As far as the polls go, Scala is in the lead by a margin of 4 to 2.
In 2007 I established several professional development goals (and later reported my progress on these), one of which was to learn Groovy and Grails. This goal stemmed from the continually referenced idea from The Pragmatic Programmer to “learn a new language every year.” This idea has become so ubiquitous that it even has it’s own four-letter acronym, LOTY (Language of the Year).
Since establishing and reporting on these goals, I’ve had several things get in the way of fully realizing all of them.
It has been a whirlwind of a day. I’ve been to two keynotes (close to 5 hours of information there) and one technical session. Couple that information with what I heard at Java University yesterday, and you find many common themes. One that keeps coming up is the emerging trend of making other languages, particularly dynamic/scripting languages, first-class citizens on the JVM.
According to Wikipedia, “Dynamic programming language is a term used broadly in computer science to describe a class of high level programming languages that execute at runtime many common behaviors that other languages might perform during compilation, if at all.