Language madness

Over the last couple of days I installed and got working both Iron Python and its big brother F# (Microsoft's reimplemenation of the OCaml language, itself a reimplementation of ML which is sort of a Python-esque compilable language for mathematicians which I have always been fascinated by but never managed to write anything useful with ... something to do with being able prove a theorem in fifty lines and taking ten lines just to open a file same as in C++)
At a loss how to try them out though, maybe I will follow Jon Udell and try writing Azure Services with them!

Arrrggh Part 2

I noticed that this week there is a new Microsoft Azure Services Training Kit released in the last few days, and dutifully re-installed the January Toolkit -- I see now there is a March CTP, but just for now I wont go there :-)
Thing is, I started back on the infamous WCF hosting example and to my great surprise, got it to work. Eventually. With some restarting and other tinkering, but nothing I didnt do back in January. So I havent actually learned anything, and to me WCF has yet to attain Just Works status. Not has Azure Services, but despite my self I am starting to like it. Fingers crossed so far.

Anders Hjelsberg

Interesting interview with the always interesting Anders here:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/an-interview-with-anders-hejls-1.html

If I understand it correctly he says that dynamic languages are a fashion because Java is too complicated but that they, like their ancestor Smalltalk, are great for small to medium projects.
That would be fine, but how many people actually do Really Enormous Projects from scratch anymore? In something like Grails, which sits on top of Hibernate and Spring, the scripting language is leveraging the non-dynamic Java platform under it, turning a Large project into a small one Anders is probably right (I am a compiled language fan myself) but for many, perhaps most non Java/.Net Framework size projects, it doesnt really matter. And the predicted scripting language disaster have yet to happen. As I said previously, despite the 'back to the future' feeling, I am won over by Python and Ruby and the other 'new' languages

I hate it when this happens

I finally got Groovy working on Windows XP. I did nothing different from what I did the last time, so totally baffled. It is only the second time I got it to work, and I never got much use out of it last time, so going to dive right in and see what all the fuss is about

Some successes

Installed and working with ASP.NET MVC -- very impressed so far.
Installed and working with DotNetNuke -- again, very impressive -- not completely painless, but quite smooth and there seem to be ways around any problems

Some fails

Continue to have problems installing Ruby on Rails on any Windows PC -- well it installs but never quite works properly. Mysterious. Also Turbo Gears. Also Groovy and Grails -- never got them to work at all on Windows