I am sitting in a gate on an airport waiting to go to ESUG so I felt I should finally get this article out the door. In a presentation earlier this year I asked what has happened in the programming language area since year 2000? Not much I felt and I couldn’t really name any interesting new language when thinking about it. But then I decided to look more closely and I can conclude I was at least partly wrong :)

So prepare for a long (too long) article digging through a whole bunch of languages trying to come up with the answer - Have any interesting programming languages appeared since year 2000?

(And at the end, how is the Smalltalk community doing?)

15-18 years ago my passion was in OODBs. As a Smalltalker GemStone was one of the most fascinating to work with, but as we all know OODBs never got really popular, despite their fantastic qualities. But the new NoSQL databases in many respects offer OODB-ish characteristics, although they of course also bring a whole new menu to the table.

In my eternal quest for “database bliss” my next stop is RethinkDB, but let me tell you how I got here.

Recently when I automated a development process I looked deeper at managing virtual environments and ended up using two really nice tools complementing VirtualBox in a slick way - Vagrant and Veewee. A lot of us use VirtualBox of course, but getting a new Ubuntu box up is still a bit of blablablabla… What if it could be done all from the command line and easily automated?

So ok, I really like looking at new interesting NoSQL databases. Up until yesterday I felt Riak was the most interesting one (have also coauthored Phriak - a Riak binding for Pharo Smalltalk) but after an evening of discussing choices of key/value backends for the Oak project I decided to “google a bit” and stumbled upon HyperDex.

After the conundrum with my Intel 320 SSD I did some googling and decided to invest a fair chunk of money in a really good SSD - the Samsung 840 Pro, 512GB. The 840 Pro seems to be the king of the hill right now and it’s only 7mm thick which is what I need for my X220 (although people have shoved 9mm drives into it with a bit of force).