Recently, in my desire to learn something new and get closer to local community of software developers, I have visited few meetings of Java User Group in Lausanne. You may ask, what can attract a .NET developer in Java community? For me it was mainly the themes what were discussed. First one I’ve attended was about Groovy and Grails – new dynamic language and a framework that are running on JVM. The second was a nice session about Scala – static, OO programming language that also integrates nicely some features from functional programming world.
So, sessions I’ve attended wasn’t really about Java, but about new programming languages. I’ve read somewhere, that in order to be a better programmer you have to learn a new language every year. Well, honestly, I’m not sure that I’d be able to learn new language that doesn’t fits in my tool belt and it’s not used daily. So, I’ve considered that the least I can do is familiarize, even superficially, with new programming languages and concepts.
I enjoyed very much both presentations.
I’m not sold over dynamic languages yet. I’m not sure it will work in a big, “enterprisey” project. But may be it’s because I don’t have any experience using it.
But I liked very much some concepts from Scala – mixins, traits and few other things are just mind blowing! The language is very clean and concise.
But, even without some of these features backed in .NET/C#, I think that development platform from Microsoft offers more for an “average” software developer. Productivity, tooling support, training. It’s only because MS has more resources to do it…