After RubyConf 2006, I realized that Ruby was not on the right track for me. I went searching for a new language. I've been a JVM guy since '96, so finding a language that was as on the JVM was a plus for me. I was looking for a statically typed language with high performance, but with the syntactic economy of Ruby. I bounced around a couple of language listing sites and found Scala. Three years ago, I fell in total love with Scala. That love continues today. What is Scala to me?

Not too long ago Google announced their new experimental, open source, system language which was said to be a mix of Python and C called Go. Immediately the internet super highway’s lights lit up and the news spread like wild fire. Comments came from all over and besides the news that another language with the same name already existed, the enthusiasm did not let up. Writing the odd ‘Hello Go’ program or dabbling with the syntax is all well and good but, until you sit down and write something a tad more useful, you do not really get to know whether a new language holds any promise. I learned about a Twitter client written in Go and asked it’s author Dmitry Chestnykh to share his experience.

Today, Google announced the brand-new programming language, called “Go”. - golang.org This is a very impressive language for system researchers like me. It has pretty nice support for threading and networking. At first, I wrote the code to use “goroutine”, a light-weight thread prepared in Go. It only consumes several kilobytes per thread, so the programmer can create thousands of threads with littile overhead. This is very useful in writing networking codes (HTTPServer, ProxyServer, Crawler, etc.). I never want to write event-based server in C/C++.

Countless times I’ve heard the argument that you should use the var keyword with caution, that it decreases readability of your code, or how it can be misused.