If you're in Atlanta tomorrow (October 27th, 2008), stop by the Atlanta .NET User Group to see me talk about Domain Specific Languages. I am doing the short session to get you ready for Oslo. Its going to be too soon after Oslo's unveiling to show you anything about Oslo, but I think the important point here is that DSL's are an important part of development whether you know it or not.
Come by and join the discussion or just heckle me if you disagree.
(NOTE: The meeting page doesn't mention this talk but it is confirmed by the organizer. Don't worry, i'll be doing the talk.)
Ted Neward's blog is one of those blogs that *everyone* should read. I am always surprised when I hear of .NET guys who don't know him. I think because he's been firmly in all camps at the same time, he often gets dismissed for "being a Java guy". Too bad for you that don't know better. Subscribe today, read the backlog, learn and grow as a developer.
His post today espouses an opinion that I first saw in the Pragmatic Programmer, learn a new language every year. Read Ted's blog to understand why if you haven't heard this before as he explains it better than I can. I've been playing catch-up and trying out a lot of languages lately. Mostly F#, IronRuby, IronPython and Boo. I hear people talk about these languages as the new 'fix' for development and I can't really profess that I believe that but it does open up your expectations about how code is written. Ideas like immutability, duck typing, loose coupling and closures are all good ideas that are hard to see if you spend your day in a staticly typed language. Sure, coming from VBScript and JavaScript in ASP number of years ago, the idea of typeless/late bound make me crazy. But there are really good ideas here. Go experiment and play with a language, it opens up your mind to getting the job done. The only thing I really can't stand is white-space significance in Python...that's just plain wrong ;)
