That Microsoft was going to increase support for dynamic languages is no surprise: they've been talking about that since (at least) PDC '03 and various hires and initiatives have clearly been in the works. I haven't seen the DLR yet, but my big question is: what version / runtime / patch level …

Jonathan Edwards has a great piece of speculation.  Man, if John Lam has produced a native CLR Ruby (maybe based on the IronPython codebase) in 8 months, he'd be the run-away winner of this year's He-Man Programming Award.

One of the reasons that functional programming is worth studying is that it abounds with opportunities for implicit parallelization. As Jon Harrop discusses in this post, the map function takes a function object f and an array [a, b, c, d] and returns [f(a), f(b), f(c), f …

The Pragmatic Programmers have a very good sense of software developmet trends -- they're doing today what O'Reilly did in the early 90s. Coming in July from them is Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang. Erlang is seen by programming language mavens as one of the real contenders for the crown of "most …

I don't know if I missed an epochal MSDN article or what, but all of a sudden, PowerShell scripts are everywhere. There are too many to point to, but when it gets to the point of posting World of Warcraft utilities, something's afoot.

Of course, debates on the theoretical effectiveness of programming paradigms may be missing the point entirely, given the too-horrifying-to-be-true assertion that many programmer applicants cannot:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the …

Mono now has native support for Visual Basic. Linux already supports a "console" approach to your hardware: pop in a CD/DVD and boot into a specialized environment. While I think general-purpose computers are more appropriate for intermediate-and-better users, the console approach is very appealing when it comes to training …

CodeGear has unveiled the first of their new development environments since their not-quite-spin-off from Borland. First is Delphi 2007 for Win32, which actually supports Vista Aero development and Ajax (as well as Win32 development). Second is their first new language in years -- Delphi for PHP. No one from CodeGear saw …

Brief and funny.

My long-time favorite Java editor JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA has added a Ruby plug-in that supports Rails. My initial reaction is that the vitally important quality of code completion is well below that of both Ruby In Steel and Komodo. Don't be too excited by the presence of the Analyze and …