Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

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.

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

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.

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.

Over the years I’ve done more work that I’d care to using Swing, the main GUI framework included with Java these days. But myself and other developers I know have become disenchanted with it, for a number of reasons. So I became quite interested when I read an article suggesting that JRuby could help save Swing. But after reading the article, I have come to the conclusion that Ruby will not be able to save Swing.