Joys of scripting

Good session by Dave Thomas. A great overview of the range of scripting technlogies and languages,or rather non statically compiled , typed languages as I prefer to see them ( not used or stressed often enough for my liking in mainstream software engineering events). A perfectly reasonable and very productive way to build software quickly and efficiently - unencumbered by constraints imposed by heavyweight language and environment framewors. There are issues to do with database access, security and scalability for enterprise systems with these languages that i hope to discuss more with the speakers later on in the conference.It's pretty much the next evolution of the wave started by Perl and has led to the rise of a new bunch of languages that are cleaner, easier, less obscure and less inbred than Perl which I hope will die a violent and preferrably unnatural death within 5 years ( hopefully in a head on crash with XSLT) . The last thing we need is an obscurantist language and culture that makes software far harder to write and maintain than it really needs to be. Like the look of Ruby and Python - have some of the ease of use and instant "getit-ness" factor that Dbase and foxpro once had. Very interesting to see a demo of a blogging engine as ruby application ( with ruby on rails and mySQL) being built from the ground up.
The development and app construction experience in ruby as reflected in the demo leaves me a bit underwhelmed. Maybe it is because they picked a fairly complex app to build - and for tha ruby on rails wasn't quite the seamless, clean and simple environment that PR releases predicted. whatever the reason, it was nothing particularly special and arguably more clunky than standard frameworks like VS2005/C#/asp.neT and some of the Java dev environments ( notably BEA workshop). This wasn't positioned so much as a demo of the language but as a plug for the ruby on rails dev environment which I have to say "wasn't all that".