This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz
by Mark Masterson.
Original Post: Groovy, JRuby, or Scala: Which JVM Language to Learn Next?
Feed Title: Process Perfection
Feed URL: http://www.jroller.com/MasterMark/feed/entries/rss
Feed Description: Life, the Universe, workflow, BPM, Java, Ruby, functional/generative/meta programming, pi calculus, patterns, the Grid, agents, software architecture and the kitchen sink. :)
An old friend pointed me towards this discussion recently. and asked what I thought about it. Whew. What to think about it? Talk about a million dollar question... And the only sensible answer I could come up with was an meek "I dunno!". After thinking hard about it for a few minutes, and listening to what my gut had to say, here's my take on this:
Ruby (and JRuby) have a locomotive-like momentum going for them
Groovy is nice. But I say that in the rather damning, faint praise kind of way that a hot babe says it about one of us geeks, "Oh, yeah, he's nice". Yawn.
Scala interests me personally the most, but I'm a geek who thinks LtU is cool. So I'm probably not representative of a broader market.
As is pointed out in the thread referenced above, Javascript is notably absent from that list, as is Python (Jython), and (insert language here) yada yada. As I said to my friend, of those missing, I think you'd have to say Javascript is the most interesting, at the moment, given its prevalence, and the increasing awareness of its functional programming power.
So, bottom line? And bearing in mind that this is a moving target / snapshot kind of thing -- pose the question in 6 months, and the answer may well be different... But anyway. My take on this would be to hedge my bets a bit. I'd go for Ruby (JRuby) and Javascript.
Previous Topic
