Taking the dynamic language tour.

I spent a good part of this weekend taking a tour of some of the most popular dynamic/scripting languages out there. I mainly looked at IronPythin and Ruby. Other dynamic languages that I've already used or researched are JavaScript and monad shell. My head is still spinning! :)

At the moment I think I like Ruby the best. I havnt quite warmed up to Pythons indention is the block scope notion yet. I like my BEGIN/ENDs and curly braces!! Some things seemed a bit more concise in ruby as well. Admittedly I'm a n00b so I havn't passed any real judgments yet.

Understanding some of the more esoteric parts of JavaScript (e.g. closures) really helped in picking up some of the ideas in these languages. I had also done a fair ammount of research with Cw which helped with many of the concepts. Cw was a gateway drug into LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ and C# 3.0. I really started to see where alot of the ideas that are in the 2.0 framework came from (iterators, anonymous delegate lightweight codegen etc) and how they lay the groundwork for next versions of C# and VB not to mention .Net versions of Ruby and Python.

It would seem that whats old is new again with the surge of dynamic features in the 2.0 CLR. Even if its new to me. :)