Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

When it comes to purchasing consumer-grade PCs these days, it’s rare to find a system with a CPU that only has a single core. Most laptops even offer a dual-core CPU. So as software developers, we’re entering a unique era where we can start to employ parallelism in ways that would not have been practical before. In some cases, we will need to exploit this parallelism if we hope to increase the performance of our software.

As most people involved with Web development know, Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released on December 7. There was some discussion about the release on Slashdot, where I noticed some interesting comments regarding scalability in the age of Ruby on Rails.

During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.

Parrot 0.5.0 was released just over a week ago. As this article discusses, one of the major changes was the transition to NQP.

While NQP brings some very interesting technical benefits, it also further shows one of the significant problems with Parrot that I identified a couple of months back. Namely, the near complete lack of design and architecture stability as the project matures.

Today I was reading an article concerning the design of new back and forward buttons for Firefox. While such thought and experimentation has its place, I’m not so sure it’s appropriate considering the current state of the Firefox codebase.

Recently, I read about how, as of the middle of November 2007, there were about 700 blocker bugs against Firefox 3.0. It is anticipated that about 80% of those bugs will not be fixed before Firefox 3.0 is released. And this is for a release that is already a number of months behind schedule.

For the past couple of weeks I have been working with a very interesting system administrator. He’s responsible for maintaining a large number of Web servers, mail servers, and database servers. Like most system administrators, he employs a number of scripts he’s developed to automate a variety of tasks. While most sysadmins would use a language like Perl or Python for developing their scripts, this fellow uses Haskell. Of course, I asked him why he used Haskell. His answers really aren’t surprising to somebody who has used Haskell before.

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.

GIMP 2.4 was recently released. Although I do very little image manipulation, GIMP is one of the more widely used open source applications, thus I like to keep up to date with its developments.

One of the first things I went to check out after reading of the release was the screenshots section of their web page. I have to say, it was a very disappointing experience.

Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I’m very impressed! Although it’s still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.

While other articles will no doubt focus on the many benefits that Kubuntu 7.10 will bring, I’d like to look forward into the future. Namely, this is because of the upcoming release of KDE 4, which is currently planned for December 11, 2007.