Comments for Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Comment on Swing is not an example of good software reuse. by bla bla

bla bla — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:31:26 +0000

! (What a compelling argument) Perhaps if they rename the menu methods you’ll feel better.

Comment on Why is NetBeans still so slow? by Rhys

Rhys — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:38:02 +0000

I find that NetBeans 6.0 runs very well on Windows XP but runs slowly (e.g. sluggish menus) under Ubunto 7.x. Eclipse on the same Ubunto machine runs very well by comparision. It amazes me that doing something a simple as the rendering of a menu should actually be visible at all these days.

BTW, in a past life this same Ubuntu machine was running Red Hat Linux 8.x and NetBeans 3.6 was extremely quick and nice to use in that environment.

Comment on Why would I want to use a “WebOS”? SSH, X11 and VNC work fine. by Cross

Cross — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:35:28 +0000

It seems that you never raise up your head to see it has been 21 Century, you really like ppl living in 80’s or 90’s. The tide of web application can not be ignored.
From the point of views of energy saving, your article is meaningless.

Comment on Neither JavaScript nor Ruby will the be the “next big lanuage”. by Arun N Kumar

Arun N Kumar — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:42:53 +0000

I dont agree with the statement or its justifications at large. A language doesnt weigh [IMO] based on certain specific aspects like Scalability, Parallelism etc. But on a whole bunch of aspects. People do trade-off these in some cases or address it with different architectural strategies[which really helps overcome these]. It just becomes that much more easier once part of a language, but not limiting.

It is indeed true, there wont be any big language, why? Growth. People are already talking about Java being bloated to death :). Every language evolves and gets complicated and during the process leaves behind quite a few benefits it had when we first chose it. Its a catch-22, if it doesnt evolve, it will die or restrain to certain domains due to its stunted growth [Scheme, CommonLisp, Prolog hmm…], but if it does evolve, it could die of obesity [take C++ for example]. Death in terms of popularity or being a first choice to many [there are nerdos programming in every possible thinkable language, yes even today].

Javascript was a disaster on the server side [SSJS], but still the best bet on a browser even today. Ruby is by far the most simple dynamic language and its growing :).

Its true, Functional Programming is the next big thing and Erlang and Haskell are promising, but they are just like their old functional cousins, limited to their intellect and tooling.

The way I see it, what really will stay is a Platform and we will have multiple languages co-existing and collaborating. On the paradigm as well we wont have a clear winner in Functional programming, OO and Imperative Programming will still rule good.

Platforms like .NET have been implicitly polyglot in nature from day one. Java is strong and mature platform and is now being very friendly to other languages and paradigms.

For instance, JRuby provides both the cool dynamic language support to the Java platform but benefits the robustness, scalability and huge bunch of features that lack in Ruby’s own platform which is C based. Scala is the new FP kid out on the block by Martin Odersky, and is on top of the Java Platform. It has a good mix of FP and OO programming.

Instead of having 10 Haskell or 10 Erlang, or even 10 Java developers trying to use their language hammer to build all kinds of apps, the world will have multiple tools JS (yes even JS), Ruby, Java, Haskell etc collaborating on a platform to build apps that are specialized by those languages. Like a JS toolkit for client apps, ruby based integration, haskell based perf oriented modules on say a java platform.

Comments and debate welcome.

Comment on Why should we have to tune the JVM’s memory parameters to run NetBeans acceptably? by Michael Campbell

Michael Campbell — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:23:19 +0000

> But Eclipse can require memory tuning parms as well.

Sure, it *can* but it generally doesn’t. Out of the box, Eclipse runs reasonably well. The author’s point here (which you appear to have completely sidestepped) is that Netbeans doesn’t.

Comment on Why should we have to tune the JVM’s memory parameters to run NetBeans acceptably? by Patrick Mueller

Patrick Mueller — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:50:34 +0000

But Eclipse can require memory tuning parms as well. I think what you’re pointing out is that it’s a shame that many programs using Java require memory tuning. Memory tuning should be relegated to optimization, instead of a pre-req to run the program in the first place. It’s a Java problem; Eclipse, NetBeans, any web container you might use, etc all inherit the problem from Java.

Comment on Why is NetBeans still so slow? by Why should we have to tune the JVM’s memory parameters to run NetBeans acceptably?

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:29:33 +0000

[…] 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 […]

Comment on Others are leaving Ruby on Rails, as well. And it’s not going well. by Josh Charles

Josh Charles — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:15:34 +0000

Copolo,

I don’t know what you mean exactly by large, complex systems. I’m current implementing a RoR application that is much more involved than a ‘basic CRUD application.’

The organizational structure of RoR makes it very easy to work with and extend as needed. Need to validate against an Microsoft Active Directory? Great, write a plugin. Need to run through a queue of processes every night at 3 a.m.? Easy, write a plugin. Need to generate images? Don’t even need a plugin for that.

RoR makes doing the web parts of your application superbly easy - better than any other framework I’ve come across. But that’s mostly just interface, right? Well, for all that ‘other stuff’ you need to do, Rails helps you keep it organized.

It’s only called ‘magic’ because you don’t understand what’s going on. Take some time to learn what’s underneath, and then you’ll be going places.

Comment on Swing is not an example of good software reuse. by boor

boor — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:20:24 +0000

You’re wrong,!! Everything in the java libraries are all magnificent….It is the most used language….

Comment on Others are leaving Ruby on Rails, as well. And it’s not going well. by Copolo

Copolo — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:22:22 +0000

It’s been my experience that frameworks or languages that perform “too much magic” - apparently one of the design goals of RoR - can be very limiting when you are implementing a well-designed system that is something more than a basic CRUD application.

I’ve seen some impressive things developed in Ruby on Rails, but I don’t think it’s an appropriate choice for the corporate level - or for software companies with more traditional processes.

RoR should be used for what it was made - quickly and rapidly developing small web applications; and should not be used for developing large, complex systems which have had a lot of underlying planning and thought put into them.