Jack Cough on Software: Scala over Ruby - My Debate Ends: This article struck a chord with me today. I spent most of today flipping back and forward between Ruby and Scala. I’m working on a project where I’m writing some Ruby talking over sockets and streams and files and I needed something JVM flavoured on the other end.

I’ve been coding in Ruby for a long time, and I love the language. It has all the object-oriented power of Smalltalk, the functional power of Lisp, and the concision of Perl. It is so powerful that it enables programmers to devise entirely new ways of writing software, and that is the hallmark of a good language. The trouble is that some of these new ways of programming aren’t good ways of programming. Over the last five years we’ve seen the ascent of Ruby on Rails and the Rails Way of doing things. I’ll be the first to admit that Rails revolutionized web development. But it has taught an entire generation of web developers to think like a cargo cult, and that’s not good.

Big announcements at the Devoxx and PDC conferences. At Devoxx Mark Reinhold said that Java 7 would be getting closures. At the Microsoft PDC conference, Azure SDK's were released for Java and PHP.