nithinbekal

Shouldn't the link be http://www.projectfedena.org/ ?

You had a trailing /s in your link which was probably taking you to the 404 page.

Ah, that's good to hear. Funny that you answered this question while I was typing it over here. :D

Glad to hear that the project is moving to Github. Hopefully you'll see a lot of commits from the OSS community.

So the team from Foradian will also be committing to the same github repo or will there be a parallel subversion repo within Foradian?

I do know that the project is being developed actively, although I believe the team has continued using subversion internally rather than move the project to github. Only the major versions are being pushed to github and the daily commits go to the subversion repo.

As for the fat controllers, I have to take the blame for that myself. A lot of the awful code was written by me over two years ago when I had close to zero programming experience. I am no longer working at Foradian (the team that developed Fedena), and haven't been able to undo the damage I left behind. :)

I do hope that the project will eventually move to github so that the OSS community (and former developers of the project like myself) could help improve the code. Would love to hear what the folks currently working on the project think of the idea.

Thanks for the advice. I'll take a look at both of them and choose the one I'm more comfortable with. Both the books look quite interesting.

Thanks for the recommendations. A lot of people are suggesting different functional programming languages here -- Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala and Lisp. I'm becoming more and more interested in learning Lisp before trying the other languages. What do you think of such an approach? Would it help me understand Erlang/Haskell/Clojure/Scala better in the future?

My past attempts at understanding Clojure have failed badly. (I must say I didn't try that hard, though.) Would a foundation in Lisp make it easier to learn Clojure?

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't Groovy/Grails too similar to Ruby/Rails and Python/Django to make it much of a challenge to learn it? How different is it from Ruby or Python?

Yeah, developing applications with ruby and rails is a lot of fun. It's easy to pick up the language, and once you know the basics of rails, building complex web apps becomes incredibly easy.

To be honest, I had to Google those names to find what the languages were like. :) Those are definitely going into the list of languages I would like to take another look at some day.

I've wanted to read the SICP book, but do you think the book may be too advanced for someone who knows next to nothing about Lisp and functional languages?

The main reason I'm looking for a new language to learn is so that I could understand programming concepts better. I took up electronics in college and then moved to software development, so my foundation in programming isn't very good. That's what I'm trying to change.

I've taken a look at those resources. In fact, I even read a bit of Learn You a Haskell and tried writing some code.

And yes, I am not looking for a language that I will use on a daily basis. If I wanted to build something now, I will pick ruby because that's the language I know best. Instead, I'd rather learn a language that makes me write code differently.

Thanks for the advice. :)

Yeah, Scala looks exciting, and from what little I've seen of its syntax, it looks different enough to be interesting. Plus there's an excellent online book that I could use to get started with it.

"...that's not allowed..." LOL! Not liking Gmail might soon become a law rather than something that is frowned upon. ;-) I'm not much of a Yahoo fan myself, but Delicious is one awesome service.

PS. Thanks for catching the typo. :) I'm terrible at proofreading.