Software
I've always had a fascination with languages. I took several language classes in high school and college: French, Spanish, German, and American Sign Language. I also have audio recordings of Mandarin Chinese lessons in iTunes. Languages have a history and richness in their forms and sounds that appeals to my sense of aesthetics.
And so it is with software. Each programming language provides a history and richness in their syntaxes and algorithms that lends itself to a certain beauty—at least the languages that I've learned. Smalltalk, with it's command that everything is an object and it's simple, but powerful, message sending syntax is sheer beauty in its simplicity. Even AppleScript, through brute force of “telling” applications what to do with its English-like syntax, can be beautiful in result if not always in code.
So what do I know? Here's a table of languages and technologies that I've learned and my level of comfort with them:
| Language | Comfort level |
|---|---|
| AppleScript | Cozy |
| Smalltalk | Getting there |
| Ruby | Cozy |
| Perl | Comfy |
| Python | Hazy |
| JavaScript | Comfy |
| Objective-C | Just getting started |
| C | Hazy |
| Java | Hazy |
I'm comfortable with most Web technologies like XHTML, RSS, AJAX, XML, JSON, Atom, and REST. In fact, I use many of these technologies whenever I build a new Web application in Ruby on Rails and I suppose I'll be using many of these technologies in Seaside, the Smalltalk-based Web application framework.
I'm also a fan of TeX and its variants like LaTeX and ConTeXt. If you want to create great documents, look no further.
Copyright © 2008. Larry Staton, Jr.