As the weeks roll by I’m finding that I have less and less time to chase up anything geek-related. I’m sure I’m not alone Responsibilities and life take over and that time which you could invest is now invested in other things, such as children

I’m dedicating this post to all those things that I currently find interesting and would love to invest time in. Some of these things are old, some new. All of them I’ve either not touched on at all, or have touched on only briefly (not enough to be satisfied). I thought I’d share them with you in case you find them interesting yourself, or perhaps have some insights which you’d like to share.

Haskell

Haskell is a fairly well-known functional programming language that’s been around for quite some time. It’s extremely powerful, and it is a lot of fun to work with. I’m certainly no expert in Haskell-land, but so far I’ve been able to do some fairly nifty stuff. I’ve been ploughing through the Project Euler challenges using Haskell and I’ve been amazed at how concise the solutions can be. I have a lot more to learn, and I’m hoping that I’ll get the chance to do just that. If you haven’t played with a pure functional language before then give this one a spin. There are a selection of compilers out there, I personally use GHC.

F#

F# is a relatively new functional language that runs on the .NET platform. It was created (I believe) by a chap called Don Syme and is gaining momentum amongst the geek community. It looks like a lot of fun and is apparently extremely powerful. If it’s anything like Haskell, then I’m sure I’ll love fiddling with it … especially when it’s got the backing of the .NET framework to leverage from. For your info, I stumbled on this little doozy which is quite an interesting read.

ASP.NET MVC

I’ve dabbled with Ruby on Rails in the past, and while I liked it I wasn’t “blown away” by it like so many other people. The Ruby language is a nice one to work with, but I feel that the interpreter needs a bit more work before I could consider it a serious choice for my needs. On top of that, Rails isn’t exactly blisteringly fast. So when the ASP.NET MVC appeared I was excited at the chance to toy with something that would fit a similar mould to Rails (as far as structure is concerned) but based on .NET (allowing me to toy with a few different languages). I’ve been a ASP.NET WebForms dev for many years now, and I never really liked the Page Model. I believe that the MVC framework is a really good step in the right direction, and I hope that when the time comes, Microsoft decides to cull the old Page Model and push ahead with the MVC as the main ASP.NET development framework. I think that this is going to be “the way of the future” as far as web development is concerned, so it’s definitely worth taking for a spin. There are stacks of resources out there to help learn, so if you’ve got time and have an interest in this sort of thing then check it out.

WPF

The latest fad from Microsoft in the rich-client area is WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I’ve always been an advocate for rich-client applications over web applications. Being a game dev geek and a fan of graphics with rich user interfaces, I’m always interested to play with new libraries and technologies that make it easier to develop such applications. It looks like a great technology that really does make WinForms look primitive. It’s a worthy option if you’re going to do some rich client dev.

Silverlight

Is it a killer for Flash? Who knows, but it’s a worthy contender. Silverlight is essentially a direct competitor of Adobe’s Flash product. It runs on the .NET platform (again) and is a subset of WPF (I believe, correct me if I’m wrong). It looks to be a viable way of getting rich interaction over the web.

Flash

As mentioned already, Flash is Adobe’s product which delivers rich experiences over the web (they acquired it when they bought Macromedia). It’s a cross-platform doohicky and runs on ActionScript. It’s been around for a long time and has a huge established user-base. I have also heard rumblings that Adobe are going to be releasing a tool which allows you to write code in other languages (such as C++) and convert it to ActionScript for use in Flash. Pretty nifty really! I think it’s a good move if they hope to stay in the game now that Sliverlight is a player.

Merb

Merb is a Ruby MVC development framework which is a viable alternative to Rails. If you’re happy to ignore the performance issues of Ruby and feel the need to build a web application with it, I’d recommend checking out Merb. I’ve heard some really good things about it.

They’re my current areas of interest. Feel free to post with stuff that’s sparking your interest! Cheers.