Grok Programming

I’ve been an Eclipse user since somewhere around 2002 and one of the things that has really annoyed me over all of that time is how hands on managing the IDE’s environment has been. I dreaded having to switch out computers or start all over with Eclipse when I changed jobs. It was back to the find and install plugin mambo each and every time. It appears that there are some new tools on the horizon that are trying to help developers in just this situation. Each of them tries to ease the developers life a little bit by taking away the pain and agony of setting up Eclipse.

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Martin Fowler on his bliki (part blog, part wiki) has a new entry about the ongoing debate about using Groovy or JRuby on the Java VM. I really don’t have a problem with anything he wrote there. I agree that both languages are interesting and worth developers getting to know and that Ruby probably has the edge on where things are going in the future. But one of the largest driving factors as to why a development team might choose either Groovy or JRuby wasn’t covered at all. So with apologies to both Martin Fowler and Ronald Reagan (not that I think he’s particularly upset with my hijacking of one of his more famous lines) I’d like to make my small addition.

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ThoughtWorks has put out its first podcast covering Domain Specific Languages. The presentation and audio quality is bit rough but the content is interesting and well worth the listen.