rexmere.com

My day job is pretty interesting On some projects, over the course of fixing one bug or adding one feature I may write or modify code written in C++, Java, Python and Lua. If our code generator is involved, you can add Perl to that mix. None of those languages is used trivially so I get a good chance to use them all "in anger".I'm not much of a language zealot though I'll admit to a strong fondness for Python and I no longer write C++/C code "for fun".Often the debate between languages these days focuses on dynamic vs. static typing. I can understand that, duck typing in particular can be awfully handy especially if you're trying to deal with an impedance mismatch between client code and pre-existing libraries. On the other hand, my sense of getting it right when I'm refactoring Java code is higher. Test coverage can be spotty on occasion especially for GUI code but the compiler sees all.Which is a long way around to get to Scala. Scala is statically typed, compiled language targeting the Java VM. While it has numerous other features that make it interesting, its significantly more efficient syntax is the reason that I'm downloading it to experiment with.That said, I do find myself drawn to the simple efficiency of a language like Python. I've had occasion to move a bunch of Java code to Python. The design was fairly good and the process was a simple translation. The reduction in code length was quite dramatic. The translation process consisted almost entirely of deleting unneeded lines of code. When I'm writing Java code (with heavy use of Eclipse tools) the process goes fast but the result just feels cluttered. There's simply more to look at when trying to understand the code. C++ and Java are really noisy languages.

Technorati Tags: Scala, Java, Python