I spent a good part of this weekend taking a tour of some of the most popular dynamic/scripting languages out there. I mainly looked at IronPythin and Ruby. Other dynamic languages that I've already used or researched are JavaScript and monad shell. My head is still spinning! :)
At the moment I think I like Ruby the best. I havnt quite warmed up to Pythons indention is the block scope notion yet. I like my BEGIN/ENDs and curly braces!! Some things seemed a bit more concise in ruby as well. Admittedly I'm a n00b so I havn't passed any real judgments yet.
Understanding some of the more esoteric parts of JavaScript (e.g. closures) really helped in picking up some of the ideas in these languages. I had also done a fair ammount of research with Cw which helped with many of the concepts. Cw was a gateway drug into LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ and C# 3.0. I really started to see where alot of the ideas that are in the 2.0 framework came from (iterators, anonymous delegate lightweight codegen etc) and how they lay the groundwork for next versions of C# and VB not to mention .Net versions of Ruby and Python.
It would seem that whats old is new again with the surge of dynamic features in the 2.0 CLR. Even if its new to me. :)
Microsoft preached up and down about how MSBuild would allow you to automate builds on a build server without having to install VS.NET. I just tried it with Team Build and I'm here to tell you thats a big lie. Check out this warning I get when running unit tests as part of the build:
MSBUILD : warning : Visual Studio Team System for Software Testers or Visual Studio Team System for Software Developers is required to run tests as part of a Team Build.
What the heck are the Team System guys thinking? This makes no sense at all. I guess as long as all you care about is converting source code into binary executables then team build will work out of the box for you. Try and do anything beyond that and you have to go install VS.NET. I must be missing something. This is just too lame.