Every once in a while you get a chance to evaluate various technologies for their suitability to a job. I’ve reached one such time, and the task is about taking a fresh look at the programming language and platform for this particular project, pick the most adequate. I’d forgotten how much fun such a journey can actually be.
In this initiative, I got inevitably drawn on the popular functional languages that many in the open source community thrive on. I’m glad I got to do this, it made me realise that I was drifting away from some of my earlier and most consistent mantra: reducing waste, fighting off verbosity in the way we build solutions.
The languages that I’ve evaluated and compared in this initiative were: Ruby (and its ecosystem), Scala, Groovy, Python, Haskell, Erlang. Why didn’t I do this earlier? It’s simply crazy not to have done so earlier and often. I’ve now learned my lesson, I’ll be doing this regularly from now on.
When architecting solutions, writing ‘no code’ is the nirvana. This being the real-world, fighting off verbosity and tedious repetitive stuff is the most efficient way to solve problems. Functional languages provide the best platforms for addressing modern computing needs.