Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Recently I voiced my concerns about the IronMonkey effort. It aims to allow programming language implementations like IronPython and IronRuby to run on the Tamarin VM.

My main concern is with regards to the runtime performance of such a stack. In short, running a program with an interpreter that is itself running on a bytecode virtual machine embedded in a Web browser raises many warning flags. When you stack one slow technology upon another, there’s a really good chance that what you’ll end up with with be, well, slow!

Every so often we hear of technologies being brought together in a way that will mean nothing but performance trouble. After reading an article about IronMonkey, I think we might just be witnessing such a situation.

The article describes the goal of the IronMonkey project as this: IronMonkey is setting out with the goal of mapping Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language (CIL) to ActionScript Byte Code (ABC), allowing additional language implementations, such as IronPython and IronRuby, to run in the Tamarin Virtual Machine.

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 was reading today about Pyro Desktop. As the Pyro homepage states: Pyro is a new kind of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing. By merging the Web with the desktop, Pyro offers the first big step toward a new future for the Web and the applications built for it.