Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Earlier this week I had a very surprising and unexpected Haskell encounter! It started when a fairly large furniture shop in the area called me in to do some work on some of their intranet software.

They wanted some functionality added to their existing Web-based purchasing system. They’d mentioned that it was CGI-based, so I was thinking it was comprised of Perl or Python scripts. However, I was quite wrong! After getting access to the source code of their CGI scripts, I noticed immediately that they were all written in Haskell.

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.

Scott Rosenberg recently wrote about how it appears to take an AJAX-based Web application about five years to mature. The examples he gives include the new Yahoo! Mail interface, as well as the new Bloglines design. But I don’t think he’s looking far enough into the situation.

We have all no doubt heard by now of SCO Group Inc. filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This news made me think back to what might be considered the “Golden Age” of SCO. Now, I’m talking of the company formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation, not today’s SCO Group. Nevertheless, much of the same software is involved, and that is where my focus will be.

Today I was reading about the “Reduced Functionality” capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a “nongenuine” copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Frankly, I just can’t see why anybody would want to use Windows Vista. I’m sure the questionable nature of this sort of functionality is quite obvious to most. And it’s also pretty obvious how the misidentification of an installation as being “nongenuine” could be quite disasterous. A completely legitimate installation of Vista locking up accidentally because of such functionality could cost an individual or business a great deal of time and money.

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.

Several days back, Opera 9.50 Alpha was released. For the time being, you can read more about the new features in Opera 9.5. Some of the notable enhancements include a better ECMAscript engine, improvements to the layout algorithm, faster font rendering, and a more responsive UI.

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.”