New programming languages

Lot's of interesting programming languages have been popping up lately. Groovy has been one that initially caught my interest and now there's a new language called Boo that looks really interesting. Boo is a language that targets the CLR, but has syntax based on Python. It's not out to make a Python clone, just to have a similar syntax that can leverage the class library and other facilities available through the CLR. It's a really interesting language and runs just fine on top of Mono on Mac OS X.

Another language that looks interesting is from Microsoft Research and is now called Comega. This is an evolution of the language that used to be referred to as X#. This language also targets the CLR and has integrated direct support for XML within the language syntax. I'm dying to have a usable language with tight XML integration so it's good to see progress in this area. Unfortunately, Comega is based around the concept of strongly typed XML which is something that I think defeats the whole point of using XML. Also in typical Microsoft fashion the compiler is available in a format that can only be installed on Windows. So far I haven't been able to try it out to see if it works on Mono. Well, actually I did try to install it on a Windows machine but the installer just silently fails so even that was unsuccessful. I suspect it's looking for the .Net framework or something else that isn't installed on that machine, but there's no information at all on what it requires. Anyway, the compiler download isn't actually linked from the Comega site as far as I can tell so you have to go to the download section on the Microsoft Research site if you want to get it. If it turns out it will run on Mono I'd love to hear about it.

Posted by Kimbro Staken