Beyond "Beyond Java"

> I can feel "Beyond .NET" being pitched to acquisition editors already…

Doesn't "Beyond Java" already do that? Mr Tate could have been evangelizing .net as the next step instead of Ruby. Wasn't .net designed ~5 after Java, offering enough time to fix early mistakes (assuming they exist)?

The only way to counter the Ruby issue is to extend the CLR and JVM to run 100% pure Ruby code. I heard some rumors that this was already happening...

Thanks Don

I spent time reading Tate's Beyond Java in the store, along side the Ruby and Ruby Rails books.

Tate also says the Java in the title can be replaced with .Net.

John Lam is working on code to integrate Ruby.
http://www.iunknown.com/

Lua is another dynamic language http://www.lua.org/.

They were funded, partially by Microsoft, and built LuaNet. You can embed the Lua interpreter in .Net applications.

Gamers are using Lua to script their applications.

Seems like thirty years experience of strong types being thrown away.

What would be great is a language that doesn't strictly enforce types, has easy syntax, visual tools for RAD development, along with the ability to easily integrate with other languages (C++, ...) and a small footprint runtime for easy distribution. Let's call this language "Visual Basic" for lack of a better term.

I'm only half-joking. It used to be a fun thing to watch unix programmers use visual basic for a while and grow to love it...not for the goodness of the langauge (adminttedly a quite crappy language) but because you could prototype almost anything very quickly...something that you can only get so far with using perl/ruby/script language of the month.

Programming Ruby
The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide is available at http://www.rubycentral.com/book/index.html