Back in touch with tech; or, How about a real programming language?

There's a singular joy in learning a new programming language, especially when you've been in the one- or one-and-a-half language rut for three years.

I tore through The Pragmatic Programmer, which is just as good as advertised, the past few days. While much of the book was already obvious to me and had already been part of my programming practice for a while, just as much was cleverly and brightly presented. "Wow, I can write my own code generators and source analyzers?" Not that it's beyond my ability to do so, but it had somehow never occurred to me to actually try it. Or I just never had a need.

Anyway, they also suggest keeping your "knowledge portfolio" up to date. It's become clear to me in the past few months that a lot of my knowledge is dating rapidly. A new language sounds like just the fix. While I'm at it, why not pick one that can help me write whizzy-bang code generators and analyzers?

I've done Perl in the past, but in my semi-regular checkins I've become impatient with the interminable Perl 6 gestation period. I'm not really interested in spending a lot of time to learn something experimental, and Perl 5 is 10 years old at this point with hardly any changes in that time. Perl is a really neat hack and a cool thing to work with, and I'm certainly not opposed to it, but as I find my own identity as an engineer and develop my own style, I feel that it's not the direction I want to be going in technically.

Next you're saying, "how about Python?" Well, I looked. Cool community, neat ideas, huge install base, pretty mature. Yet... there's something about it that just sounds foreign to my ears. While my company does a lot of internal work in Python, little of it is in spaces that scratch my itches. I think I'll pass for now. Maybe one day I'll check it out again, possibly even learn it, but right now I'll focus on the other alternative: Ruby, the other language we use internally.

This Ruby thing is neat. It works for me because:

1. it's different enough from Java and C# and D to be a good mind-stretcher;
2. it kicks ass at text processing;
3. it's dynamically typed and puristically object-oriented;
4. Rails is the new hotness in web architecting.

My Ruby education is just beginning, but already there are some ideas in it that have made me sit back and clap excitedly. Here's one neat nugget from an exception handling mechanism:

rescue ProtocolError
  if @esmtp then
    @esmtp = false
    retry
  else
    raise
  end
end

See what that does there? rescue is an exception handler, like a catch in the C++ family. Yet the keyword retry tells the control flow to reenter the exception scope after attempting to repair the error. Are you freaking kidding?! That kicks ass! That one little bit just blew my mind enough to make me completely interested in what Ruby has to say.