It’s possible to explore too little, only producing, getting stuck in a productive rut, a local maximum, eventually obsolete. I’m too often stuck in the opposite rut–only exploring, not getting anything done. So I take vicarious pleasure in reading that Bryn Keller has settled down and chosen a language. Typically, I subscribed to Keller’s blog about six months ago while looking at Nice, a very pragmatic and nice JVM hosted language about which Keller has written several times.

Keller chose Haskell, which is doubtless a good choice, though it sounds like he doesn’t have any outside constraints:

The thing is, I’ve noticed that the code I write in Haskell is usually more elegant than the code I write in other languages, and since this is my time, I can choose what’s important. Crisp, elegant code is important to me.

These days what little programming I get to is mostly Python (largely because Nathan brings Python expertise to my employer, and Python is acceptable), Tcl (two legacy codebases), and PHP and Java (because they’re impossible to avoid).

I don’t think I can resolve to settle down, but I do resolve to retire those Tcl codebases, real soon now (nothing against Tcl; I’ve grown a bit fond of it over the years).