Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

JavaScript has been around for over a decade now. During that time, we’ve seen it implemented by every major browser vendor, and thus we’ve seen it become widely used by many Web sites. We’ve even seen JavaScript used in non-Web applications and uses.

But JavaScript has some pretty serious drawbacks. The performance of the various JavaScript interpreters embedded in the popular Web browsers has always been less than ideal. And being interpreted, it often becomes more difficult to detect syntax errors and other common mistakes. Worse yet, being weakly typed opens JavaScript scripts up to a whole host of type-related problems.

When you mention the Ada programming language to most developers, they tend to think of embedded software development, typically in mission-critical environments such as aircraft and electric power plant control systems. But we shouldn’t think that such environments are the only place where Ada can be of use. For the past several weeks, I have been working with a shipping company that makes extensive use of Ada for their in-house software.

A few weeks back, at the end of December, FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 was released. FreeBSD 7 will no doubt prove to be quite revolutionary. For one thing, this will be the first major FreeBSD release in a number of years. FreeBSD 6.0 was released in November of 2005, so there has been quite some time for the development of FreeBSD 7 to take place.

KDE 4.0 was released several days back, and thanks to the KDE Four Live CD, I was able to give it a try with very little effort. Having used it for about a day and a half now, I’d like to share some of my impressions of this new release of KDE. Specifically, I will be focusing on the Konqueror 4.0 Web browser. But please keep in mind that I have not performed any formal studies or benchmarking, and what follows is merely my opinion.