It's been quite a while since I have used my keyboard for anything other than work. Yet I have been reading others' blogs and articles and I think the itch became overwhelming for me to return, well, that and I'm beginning to see the advantage of writing as part of my mid-career development.

I intend to return to the world of the blog soon, I have indeed many developments to discuss and to provide thoughts on. This is particularly poignant now since I have been working with much more technologies in the past year, and surprisingly mostly not, especially from within my much beloved functional world.

Almost the contrary, I have been in deep learning mode for several alternative languages, many of which I have found to be pretty awesome. I have been swotting up on the new(ish) cult-like Rust, a (not so surprisingly very very good Systems programming language that is now being used for more than deep-level embedded stuff). In particular, its memory management system is pretty nice.

Next, several projects on the horizon have suggested a need for me to return to my roots with Java and the JVM which I have always loved. A lot has changed since my days of Java (5) and it seems to be not only hanging in there but thriving, with some fantastic features and frameworks to boot (we're looking at the soon-to-arrive Spring 6, which looks like a killer of a release). Whilst on the JVM, Kotlin is now supported in Spring, and Spring Boot (3) and this is a breath of fresh air. Whilst I Love Java, there is definitely a more clean feeling with Kotlin. Kotlin is especially great with Android apps, but it's nice that it's being used outside the Mobile world too, I think maybe a few posts on this later are warranted.

I'm still functional in my spirit, and despite this foray into the more OO, I have nonetheless, been also fooling about a bit with the old guards, trying to evolve my knowledge of coding and architecture through experiments with Haskell and Lisp (Clisp) as well as playing about with Clojure still. There is a lot to be said for deconstructing the lexical complexity of Monads, and purity, it really reveals a lot about not only software architecture, but also about the way we approach and write our code.

So for any of my stragglers who still may occasionally glance at my posts, there is more to come, I intend, to begin once again to consume the cathartic and pedological benefits of writing, about software, software architecture, and all between.

As they say, watch this space....