There is a new kid (language) on the block called Nemerle . It is an interesting hybrid language and at first impression, it looks like a mix of Perl and C#. It has some interesting things such as the when loop instead of the if loop as well as dynamic typing which makes it an interpreter-kind of language. I liked the def syntax but not the mutable syntax. Just first impressions…

The tutorial gets right down to business and there is a separate page which neatly lists the differences between Nemerle and C# in a table. There has already been a 0.10 release as well and works on Mono 0.30 as well as Microsoft .NET.

An interesting aspect is that Nemerle is yet another open source technology, and language in this case that is taking advantage of the .Net and Mono frameworks (as compared to the Java framework). The fact that these frameworks are fuelling such innovation is very compelling. Also, the multi-language capability of .Net/Mono is highlighted here.

Now this is something really really cool.

Jim Hugunin has written an implementation of the Python language which uses .NET CLI as the backend. So what it means that your program is still in Python but it is running on .NET . So what, you say? Yes, I know there is already Jython, but what is interesting about IronPython is that it is giving 70% better improvement in performance compared to the CPython implementation! That’s a huge improvement if you ask me. You can read more details in Jim’s post

When I mentioned Jython, if it didn’t ring a bell in your head, let me explain. Jython is an interpreter for Python written in Java. This means that you can write Python programs using the Java libraries – in effect, combining the power and simplicity of the Python language with the huge class libraries of Java. For example, you can write code like this to open a Java Swing frame using the Python language (with the Jython interpreter):

from javax.swing import JFrame
f = JFrame('Jython swings!')
f.setSize(400, 300)
f.show()