After a 6 month hiatus from the blogosphere, I am back.  Well, almost 6 months.  On July 17th, 2006 I proclaimed that after 80 posts on the topic of software industrialization, I did not have much more to say about it.  Today I do.

 

Before I dive into the post about what I think the best new programming language released in 2006 was, (the language isnt new, but the implementation is), I want to take a slight detour.  I have a confession to make.

 

The confession is that I fell into the pervading consciousness of some in our software development industry where cynicism, negativity and ego rule.  One reader of my blog, (bless you Martin Danner) said that my recent posts conveyed a sense of frustration, cynicism and downright hopelessness.  Martin told me to cheer up, all is not lost and in fact the seeds of change have sprouted.  Thank you Martin, you were right.  I was spending way too much time reading posts from: Mini-Microsoft, Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge,  Jeff Atwood, Rands in Repose, TheDailyWTF, etc.  Regular readers of these authors know what I mean.

 

Now dont get me wrong here.  I have a lot of respect for these very smart people and mostly what they write is well written, entertaining, and even thought provoking.  However, there are times where each of them have also succumbed (in some cases, more often than not) to the cynical world of Dilbert software development where everything is a rant or complaint or WTF!  You would think you are reading Dennis Miller Rants.

 

I will be the first to admit I have done my fair share of that in the past and on this blog. For those of you that knew me when I ran my own software company, I could be the darkest, most cynical you-know-what in the world.  So whats changed?  I realized that after 15 years in this biz I could just be yet another cynical puke or I could do something positive for myself and the software industry I work in - like contribute an open source project of some sort that would make the process of designing software more predictable and repeatable than it is today (i.e. the industrialization of software). I started that quest over 6 months ago and may take a year or two to finish.  But thats another post and not my point.

 

The point of this digression is that I am a bit disappointed in the Joel Spolskys, Steve Yegges and the others I mention above, of the world.  I am disappointed in that they could really influence the positive direction of our software development industry, rather than b*tching and stitching, in a well written manner about how everything sucks.  I know some of it is not to be taken seriously, but at the same time people look up to these industry thought leaders.  How is this constant barrage of negativity going to help our industry?

 

Do you understand what I mean? I try not to take myself or my work too seriously, but I do.  I cant help it.  And neither can most of the programmer types I have worked with over my software career.  Its simply who we are and it is interesting to find other like minded people have chosen this profession.

 

So what does that have to do with the best new programming language released in 2006?  A lot actually.  I find it an uplifting story where Jim Hugunin, 3 years ago, started to think about ranting on why the .NET CLR would be a terrible platform for dynamic languages.  Three years later on September 5th, 2006 an open source programming language from Microsoft called IronPython was released.  Having played with IronPython for six months, it gets my vote for easily being the best new programming language released in 2006.

 

Why?  My criteria is very simple.  What is the simplest way, or to phrase it differently, the most productive way to write a windows program?  (e.g. ASP.NET web form, WinForms, or XAML WPF).  Here is an example:

 

 

Note while the least number of code lines count to a certain degree, it is the simplicity that matters the most.  What could be simpler than opening an interactive console window and typing in, line by line, almost English sentences while getting immediate feedback after executing each line.  Either the line you executed succeeded or failed.  I love when decisions are binary.  In fact, by line 3 in the example above, you already have a real live active WPF window being displayed on the screen, so now it becomes mostly a visual experience.  Who needs testing?  The testing is built right in, in real time either the window displayed or it did not.  I know I am being simplistic, but perhaps our programming world could do with more simplicity.  I have over 10 years invested in learning the Visual Studio IDE and even with James Averys most excellent book, Visual Studio Hacks, I still only know maybe 60% of the complex features of VS2005.

 

The reason I said most productive is because I believe that the code, build, run, and debug loop of most statically typed programming languages are a real barrier to productivity.  I love C#.  I use it in my day job.  It also frustrates me because I am locked into the code, build, run, and debug cycle. I just dont work that way.  I like the exploratory iterative approach with immediate feedback as a way to design software.

 

James Schementi has written a nice article on IronPython called, CLR Inside Out.  Jeff Cogswell has written another nice article called, "A First Look at IronPython: Where Python meets .NET.  Both of these authors do a much better job than I explaining the productivity virtues of IronPython.

 

IronPython is free.  The source code is also free and both the object and source can be freely distributed in your own application, which is exactly what I am planning to do with my own open source software design tool.  Stay tuned.