scripting here I come

So I'm ashamed. I've been putting off learning a new scripting language for way too long. Commence beating me with a rubber duck now.

So why do I even need to learn something like this? I consider myself a pretty good C++ and Java programmer. On top of that I feel like I can fully embellish the heavy-lifting fruits of JEE when it comes to building robust servers. And unlike others in the development world I'm just not turned on by syntactical candy like "no accessor methods required."

The main reason is I do think dynamic scripting languages have a place in my deployments and I like some of the things they are doing in the web-tier world. While the interface-driven language characteristics makes Java a powerful player in the services/backend world it can sometimes be a bit tedious when pumping out web flows. So for the time being my services-tier will always be the heavy-weight JEE server. But I need to learn something smooth to fit on the front.

So what are my options? Well the talk on the town is Ruby. I wrangled with this in my previous posts and I'm simply not a fan. Lets forget for a second that its so slow it makes Java in the early 90's look good. My issue is its almost diabetic on syntactical candy. Who cares if you can do 50 things with 3 command words, I still can't understand it! And the parenthesis rule drives me crazy. Either make the developer use them or don't. Because of this I feel like the Ruby community is full of language evangelists who's only defense of Ruby is
"but its so agile". Remember, a scripting language is suppose to be easier to read/understand than embedded C. And personally I think the Rails framework has some serious functional issues.

Groovy is a Ruby-like language that gets compiled to the JVM. I like it because they took the best of java and ruby and blended them together. I'll keep this in my bag of tricks but I'm not sure this is the complete answer. And lets face it, I can't spend my life in a VM.

Python is a little different for me. My co-worker is a big python guy and I've been listening to what he has had to say. I'm a picture-drawing sudo-code-thinking abstract engineer. If we have a design session and you start throwing byte orders out at me I'll get lost until a dry erase board is brought in. Python seems to really target people like me with their sudo-syntax approach. Plus I like some of the more java-like features they have annotations. Also, compared to Ruby their plugin bank seems to be much more full. And most of all when I ask python people why they like it they can actually tell me things about the language they like.

So Python it is! My next few posts will be how a Java and JEE lover tames the rabid python.


[UPDATE] First note about python.. the main website is python.org, not python.com. Lets hope that doesn't show up in the web logs at work.