Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Although it hasn’t (yet?) caught on much in industry, anyone who follows modern computing trends will no doubt have heard of D. Its Web site describes it quite nicely: D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. The D language is statically typed and compiles directly to machine code. It’s multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It’s a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++.

I read today a blog article about the greatly-increased complexity of ECMAScript 4, relative to earlier versions. Indeed, the number of features is quite staggering. And the first thing it made me think of was C++.

C is a relatively small language. That’s understandable, considering it was initially developed for system-level programming on computers with rather minimal resources. Soon enough, Stroustrup and others developed C++, adding a variety of higher-level constructs to C. Over time, C++ has grown to be a rather complex beast.

Several days back, Opera 9.50 Alpha was released. For the time being, you can read more about the new features in Opera 9.5. Some of the notable enhancements include a better ECMAscript engine, improvements to the layout algorithm, faster font rendering, and a more responsive UI.

There was some discussion at Slashdot recently about bloat-free software. Many people were giving examples such as Firefox, Opera, and GIMP. But when it comes to truly bloat-free software, I think NetBSD is a perfect example.

Necessity is part of the reason why NetBSD is bloat-free. A bloated operating system just cannot run on the wide array of vintage hardware that NetBSD supports. So bloat-avoidance is an integral part of their development philosophy.

When it comes to judging programming languages, there are three main factors that we need to consider: programmer productivity, the application feature set that can be implemented, and the runtime performance of the developed applications. There are, of course, many others, including memory usage, portability, and implementation cost. However, memory is plentiful these days, most languages have cross-platform implementations, and many of these implementations are free or have a low cost. So the three factors mentioned in the title become the most important ones.

I heard today that the development of Dolphin Smalltalk has been discontinued. Although it isn’t a product I used or was familiar with, I have been involved with a number of Smalltalk-based development efforts in the past. While it was somewhat popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the commercial usage of Smalltalk has declined significantly since then.

When it comes to programming languages and programming technologies, I think we’re getting close to a point similar to that of twenty years ago. In 1987, many enterprise software systems were being written in languages like C, COBOL, and even PL/I at some shops. Some places were ahead of the curve, and were using Smalltalk.

Michi Kono recently wrote about how the most talented Web developers are usually also the most talented application developers. I propose that we take it a step further: a great Web developer is usually a superb application developer. Or in a different light, a great Web developer is a waste of a really great application developer.

When the computing world moved from manually toggling input switches to machine code encoded on paper tape, there was a vast improvement in programmer

I recently wrote about the troubles I had using the JavaScript-based Brickslayer game. Please read my earlier article to get a good idea about the numerous problems I ran into. Also read this comment to that article. Somebody going by the name joe, stated the following: quite right. JavaScript is NOT for games or animation. However for most other things on the web, it works quite well.