Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

I used to be a VB 4, 5, and 6 hacker back in the day and I will confess that when I first went down the .NET path I chose VB.Net as the language vehicle of learning. Shortly after developing my first .NET application I made the immediate decision to switch languages and decided to use C# as my first choice. The reasons were simple: I found the language more compact, more elegant to read and the resources for .NET in the early days seemed to far more abundant in C#.

From time to time I do choose to implement a component or two using VB.Net; this was simply to stay in touch with the language. Most recently I found this exercise a bit harder to stomach when I had to write some lambda’s in VB 9.0.

Dim dlo As DataLoadOptions = New DataLoadOptions()
dlo.LoadWith(Of Customer)(Function(c As Customer) c.Orders)
db.LoadOptions = dlo

Any more brackets and keywords and I would be ready to pick up my guitar to make a living. This code had me really thinking that I was glad to that my “checking in with VB.Net” was an occasional practice, in fact it got me to thinking that perhaps it was becoming a bit of waste of time and that the practice should be more about checking out a new language paradigm rather than another empirical statically typed language for the same platform. Enter the polyglot programmer debate. And so, the outcome is that I have made the determination that my spare “language time” will go into Ruby and F# having assigned some value to the idea that both functional and dynamic languages should be explored NOW and in some depth. Functional programming has caught my imagination quite a bit of late and I can see some real application in the document management domain where we constantly find ourselves dealing with large recursive trees of data that are immutable.