For fun I just finished reading Pierce's Types and Programming Languages. I missed some of the formal background for PL while in school since I skipped a pre-req or two to get into a compiler class that my favorite professor was teaching. It was nice to go back and fill in the gaps. TAPL came highly recommended from LtU and it didn't disappoint. Now, of course, I'm seeing new programming languages as the answer to everything.
More specifically I'm interested in the practical difference between a statically structurally typed language with type inference and a dynamically typed language. It seems that structural typing gets pretty close (depending on the implementation) to the duck typing promised by languages like Ruby while still being checked at compile time. Obviously there are some compromises like meta-programming, but there are even some statically typed languages that offer this as well.
Unfortunately there isn't a good candidate .net language to play with. Although OCaml is structurally typed, F# remains nominally typed, probably for .net interop reasons. Because of the nature of the CLR, any structurally typed language would have to in effect fake it, via reflection or something. I'm thinking of writing a toy language just to play with this, exposing parameters as "object", invoking methods via reflection, and maybe indicating type constraints via an attribute or something. Hopefully I'll find some time for this.
Also, this is quite good (and released under a Creative Commons license), despite the Boring Manager's name.
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