Picking a language
I was pretty tired last night so I crashed early with some progress made but many big open questions. For some reason it's really hard to pick a language. The final candidates are C++, Ruby, and Groovy. They all have
- C++: this is where I cut my programmer teeth. The Boost libraries made C++ a final contender, no time to work with the default APIs or learn something like NSPR. Still, the skills are rusty.
- Ruby: Every time I use Ruby I like it a lot. Skills not quite as strong as...
- Groovy: I've spent way too much time around javac lately. It would be easy to use Grails as a REPL and test harness. However, an expensive IDE is an unspoken requirement in the Grails community. I reject that entirely, even if it means submitting a half-baked groovy mode for emacs.
I would love to misuse Grails as REPL and test harness, but I am afraid of problems migrating the code into a standalone JAR file. Developing the controller code as a JAR from the start leaves some of the benefits on the table. Rejecting the expensive IDEs leaves me with printf debugging and mediocre indenting / syntax highlighting.
C++ has great support within Emacs and GDB. I'm pretty sure I've forgotten many important C++ coding rules and would hate to get bitten by them during development. Not the least of which is manual memory management... I admit to being spoiled here now.
Ruby isn't my strongest language, but the design of the language is very comfortable to me. Combine that with good IDE support and I think that makes it the best overall option.
That took entirely way too long. Not a good omen 
