Friday, March 16, 2007

Morning Coffee 46

Sort of late this morning due to back to back meetings...

• I seem to have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest with my "kinda surprising that no other mainstream language has done this before" comment. Dennis Hamilton and Mike Parsons both asked about other dynamic languages like Javascript and Python in my comments. To be clear, the ability to add a new method to a specific object instance is fairly common in dynamic languages. Extension methods in C#3/VB9 is a different capability - it only supports adding new methods to a class, not to specific object instances. I'm not sure what dynamic languages other than Ruby supports adding new methods to both object instances and classes, but I'm sure they're out there.
• Some anonymous commenter asked "why invent another language for PowerShell if there are so many great popular languages already in existance [sic]?" I can't speak for the PowerShell team, but I think they were better off inventing a new language specificly designed for their scenario than they would have been shoe-horning in existing lanugage. To their credit, it looks like the PS team took great care to make the PS lanugage accessable by leveraging common syntax and idioms from other shell programming environments. I'm not a shell programming expert, but isn't PS more a variant of shell languages that have come before than a brand new language?
• I want a "Works on My Machine" T-Shirt.