Secret Words

29 July 2014

I’ve been working in a few different languages lately for a host of reasons… mostly involving self-education in various ways. I realized a few years ago that in every language I picked up, I was trying to build a safer meta-language (really a suite of safe design patterns and coding styles) that works anywhere. Simple principles like:

• using ‘final’ variables by default
• using ‘Option’ objects to model the “one or none” problem
• using visitors (or double dispatch) to handle type variety rather then runtime interrogation

Thankfully, the current crop of new languages attacks these issues head on! So these are the langauges I’m looking at in some depth:

• Javascript, specifically in the form of node.js and angular. Via Coupling and Farseer.
• Swift via a game codenamed ‘Squishy’. I’m deliberately not making the source code available for this for now, though I intend to include interesting code snippets here periodically.
• Google Go, aka golang. I still haven’t found the right project to explore this yet.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated with notes as I learn stuff. Excelsior!