Learn a new language over the holidays

I am off in about an hour until the new year and I am pretty excited to have a nice long break. If you are looking to pick up another language over the Holidays I would suggest looking at 2 languages. Groovy/Grails if you want to stay in a similar environment and python because well it just seems cool and a buddy of mine is a python developer and swears by it. Luck for you Grails 1.2 was just released. I did a quick scan through the new features and found something that I thought was pretty cool. GORM now supports defining named queries in a domain class. For example, given a domain class like this: class Publication { String title Date datePublished static namedQueries = { recentPublications { def now = new Date() gt 'datePublished', now - 365 } publicationsWithBookInTitle { like 'title', '%Book%' } } } This allows you to do: // get all recent publications def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list() // get up to 10 recent publications, skip the first 5... def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list(max: 10, offset: 5) // get the number of recent publications... def numberOfRecentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.count() // get a recent publication with a specific id... def pub = Publication.recentPublications.get(42) // dynamic finders are supported def pubs = Publication.recentPublications.findAllByTitle('Some Title')

I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday and if you have some extra time fill your brain with some knowledge!