New programming technologies

I read once that a good programmer should learn one new language a year in order to stay current. I am checking into two of them right now.

Ruby on Rails is an open source framework that allow one to rapidly develop applications. The most attractive thing to me is that it is well designed so things fall into their appropriate buckets (model/view/controller). It is designed with change in mind and let me tell you, that is valuable thing when working with customers with ever changing specs.

Openlaszlo is another open source framework that allow you to design either Flash or DHTML based web 2.0 applications that looks really nice and "with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software." After playing with it for about 30 minutes, I like it quite a bit but I think someone who is more of a designer would find it even more attractive. It is very interface focused.

I got few ideas brewing. In the past, I have often committed the error of paralysis by analysis, thinking too much about my applications instead of just build something and see what happens. I was inspired again by the free book Getting Real to stick with the basics and not get ahead of myself. The game is afoot!