Bright Future for Dynamic Languages

I find myself fascinated by the increasing popularity of dynamic languages. For many of us dynamic language introduction came by way of Ruby, Python, and/or Javascript. While my fascination with these languages hasn’t ended, I am more enthralled with dynamic languages whose strength is concurrency. Indeed, these are exciting times and there is a shift happening in the software community. Honestly, who hasn’t bragged on Twitter that they just finished reading the latest book on Clojure or Erlang? Clearly there is momentum and change in the air. The future of software and computing in the next 10 or 15 years is being shaped and molded with the underlying fundamentals and principles of these languages.

I’m excited about the evolution happening. There is a higher degree of maturity, professionalism, and most importantly scientific and mathematical infused creativity. We’ve all heard the anecdotal comparison of a craft like architecture versus software. Yes software as a craft is merely a fetus when compared to architecture. For centuries architecture has used equal parts science and artistry to build some of the most breathtaking sites in the world. I believe the software community has really begun using more scientific and mathematical backed artsy creativity. We must flex both sides of our brains to imagine the crazy, the impossible, and make it reality. I digress…back to the languages.

Why am I so fascinated? The bottom line is we are evolving and learning.

• Language composition and leverage
• Developer productivity
• Functional programming and concurrency

Clojure and JRuby both run on the JVM. Undoubtedly there are statistics somewhere showing that Java is one of the most popular languages of our time and it is probably running in your software shop in some capacity. As a result the barrier to entry for integrating and using these new languages has been lowered. It is comparatively easier than the transition when Java gained über popularity in the 90′s. However, this isn’t as important and _fascinating_ as how these languages integrate directly with the Java language. The number of possibilities for composing and leveraging preexisting Java libraries with these languages seems endless. This eliminates many reasons to reinvent a library or API. When you wish you could use some Java component, framework, or API, you can – easily! I’ve used this fact to my advantage using JRuby numerous times. The other really neat possibility that I haven’t messed around with yet is using Clojure in JRuby.

The next reason for my interest is directly related to why Ruby is hot and will remain so for a long time. On a side note, I feel the need to disclose that I am not a Ruby “fan boy”, I’ve spent my time in the ranks wrestling with C and Java and still have an fond appreciation for both. Back to what is important, developer productivity. Here are some of the things these dynamic languages really excel in, while keeping in mind that correlation doesn’t imply causation:

• It will make your developers happy to write less elaborate wordy boilerplate code
• Writing less boilerplate code usually results in writing more human readable and elegant code (it has been said before that code should be human readable first and just coincidentally interpreted by a machine)
• More human readable code can improve maintainability, health, and longevity of the code base
• Maintainability can result in greater agility to output more business value

Mathematicians have been joking that they’ve known that functional programming rocks for a pretty long time now. How could they not? Functions are the premise of their craft. It is true they’ve been using Lisp, Sage, and Python for years. I remember my MCS professors telling us in the late 90′s and early 2000′s that we better learn why these languages are kick ass (all the while they were teaching us the principles of OOP with this new language called Java). In fact, I noticed the other day that the new course outlines for MCS students at UIC have plenty of functional programming aspects using Python and Lisp. Sure Python isn’t a purist’s functional language, but anything with support for closures will do. Joining the bandwagon, I am trying to get good with Clojure at the moment with the trusty Pragmatic Programming Clojure book at my side. I am not going to lie, it has been tough to wrap my head around this concept (but doesn’t that generally happen with anything outside your comfort zone?). I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Erlang or Haskell in the context of popular functional languages. I suppose I could of chosen either one of those. I felt like Clojure was a better fit for me since it runs on the JVM, it’s dynamic, and the application of my learnings would be easier to integrate at work. So I have written fewer lines of code and as a result things are just concise. I am not sitting there worrying about immutability and concurrency they are just the fruits of my labor. As I finish writing this post, Uncle Bob has been tweeting all week about monads and Clojure so I know I’m on the “right track”. I hope to extract some of the cool ideas out of the O’Reilly Collective Intelligence book and write them in Clojure.

I’m definitely stoked about the future with these languages. There is certainly so many possibilities and cool things to come. So the question is what will you be doing with these languages or more importantly the community?

Apr 10, 2010 | Software | 2 Comments »