One thing I’m curious about is Scala. I’ve been working with a research group lately on a project using Intelligent Agents, and through that was introduced to the idea of Functional Programming. Somehow I missed seeing this in my undergraduate days, though I remember my peers complaining about Scheme in one of the senior-level computer science courses.

Some of the talks on Groovy and Grails seem interesting, too. The Ruby on Rails movement has certainly sparked some innovation in the Web Development community, and I like seeing those ideas cross-ported into the technologies I have more of an affinity for, such as Java and ColdFusion. Having recently built a somewhat painful full-scale Java application, there may be something useful here.

I’ve tinkered with Ruby on Rails a bit and liked what I saw, though I have to admit to my own “struggling with some typical Not-Invented-Here” as Kemper said in the article. ColdFusion allows me to be extremely expressive in a simple, easy to read code, and Ruby certainly steps up to the plate in that regard. Parts of Rails just seem odd — particularly the need to follow the implementers’ style and naming techniques to really make the most of Rails’ speed of development.

Hopefully something will come up that will give me a reasonable project to give RoR a deeper look.