Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

We’re beginning to enter a new era in computing. We’re rapidly leaving the days of uniprocessor systems. This has been the trend in the enterprise world for some time now. But with Intel and AMD releasing dual- and quad-core CPUs, and these CPUs being used even in low-end systems, they will soon become near-ubiquitous. Unfortunately, few of our programming languages and development platforms are truly equipped to handle the parallelism that we will be seeing on the typical desktop system in the near future.

Chris Diggins has written a great article about the power that visual programming languages might hold. One specific example he mentions is Scratch. Another is Logo. Perhaps we will see a much greater use of such languages in the future. But I am hesistant to think that such will be the case. Part of the reason is the impact that modelling lanuages like UML, and the tools built around such modelling languages, have had on today’s developers.

I recently wrote an article entitled ‘JRuby cannot save Swing’. Well, Danno Ferrin has written a rebuttal of sorts that I’d like to address.

He does bring up a good point about performing heavy operations in the event dispatch thread. Such things can become a real problem, in terms of the application’s performance and responsiveness. However, I’m not convinced that such developer mistakes are the only problem.

It’s often the most flashy and rapidly-developed open source applications that get the most attention. Most people focus on projects like Beryl, Metisse, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu. But we can’t forget the importance of the open source software an average user doesn’t see every day. This is a list of nine such programs and libraries.

Over the years I have done much in the way of C++ and Java development. Each language does have its benefits and drawbacks. Today I read an article that suggests that Java is better than C++ for software development, and I think it failed to touch on some pretty significant issues. I’d like to discuss some of the problems I saw with parts of the article.