Ruby/Flex

Ruby is cool. See this example: # Ruby knows what you mean, even if you want to do math on an entire Array cities = %w[ London Oslo Paris Amsterdam Berlin ] visited = %w[Berlin Oslo] puts "I still need to visit the following cities:", cities - visited And it WORKS. No helper functions, no loops scanning for items missing from visited, just nice, clean code. I also think Flex is pretty cool - both are challenging programmers to leave their comfortable .Net/ASP and Java/JSP environments and thinking about using Flash for more than just movies, and thinking of webpages in an MVC model (not that that's always appropriate, but often it can be a cleaner separation than just using code-behind). Ruby has some really cool features, like making blocks of code objects that can be assigned to variables - you can *pass around code like it was a variable/function*. It's really just taking the concept of an anonymous function and making the variable a pointer to the code, but in a really high level language. And flex lets you finally write some good logic into flash, making rich internet apps easier to write (not easy, just easier - I dislike the IDE).