Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Many Java developers have at least some experience with the NetBeans IDE. Although I prefer Eclipse for Java development, I do try to use NetBeans occasionally to keep up to date with their developments. The last time I tried it, the results were rather terrible. I found NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 to be extremely slow, even on a modern system with a multicore CPU and gigabytes of RAM. It wasn’t just a matter of it not running well for certain intensive operations. It was sluggish and barely usable for even just editing text.

Several months back, there was somewhat of an uproar in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities when it was revealed that after two years of effort, the CD Baby Web site was abandoning their Ruby on Rails rewrite. The CD Baby site was reimplemented in mere months after returning to the use of PHP. This past week, I have been working with another company that is in a very similar situation.

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.

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++.

About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .

Today I had an opportunity to use NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1. Just for the record, it was used on a uniprocessor Core 2 Duo system, with 2 GB of RAM. The operating system was Ubuntu Linux, with the nVidia OpenGL drivers installed, on Sun’s 1.6 JVM. The Java 2D OpenGL pipeline was enabled, as well.

Several days back I wrote about Parrot, specifically the doubts I have that it will ever be suitable for production use. A link to my article was submitted to Reddit, and it generated some discussion. From that discussion, there is one comment in particular that I would like to respond to.

Based on this article, it sounds to me like Douglas Crockford, of JSON fame, has realized the pathetic state of Web-based application development. It was quite refreshing to see an architect at a major Web firm (Yahoo!, in this case) point out the numerous and obvious flaws when using Java applets, JavaScript, XML, CSS, HTML, and AJAX for application development.

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.

Earlier today I was reading an article about Parrot. Parrot is, as stated on the project’s Web site, “a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator.”