 What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
baguasquirrel: Haskell.  I avoided it for the longest time because of the purely-functional-no-side-effects zealots.  As it turns out, it is a surprisingly powerful and beautiful language, and you can get quite far without needing OO.The paradigm wars will rage on, but in the meantime, the rest of us have a language that has a rich library set and a very rewarding programming experience.  The usefulness of applicative monads, functors and typeclasses have convinced me that there's something much, much bigger out there with regards to these so-called design patterns, something that we have not even begun to explore and discover.