[Kevin Kelly]: In the past few decades, we’ve seen remarkable performance improvements in most technologies—but not in software. Why is software the exception?
Brooks: Software is not the exception; hardware is the exception. No technology in history has had the kind of rapid cost/performance gains that computer hardware has enjoyed. Progress in software is more like progress in automobiles or airplanes: We see steady gains, but they’re incremental.
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It's 2010, 15 odd years after we all started playing with the presentation technologies of the web, and now there’s a super mature set of best practices which have emerged based on what’s shaken out as good (and bad) from the school of hard knocks. Happily I’ve ignored this for so long, that I have very little bad habits to unlearn (I’ve forgotten all the ones I had), and I can just pick up the good parts that these authors have been kind enough to distill:
Thankfully, because they focus only on the good parts, they are both nice short books.
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Found a great sketchy font that’s not the usual handwriting simulation:
It’s a commercial font, BUT the ‘Light’ face is free. See MyFonts:
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“Will HTML 5 make rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash/Flex and Microsoft Silverlight obsolete? For at least the next five years, the answer is a definite "no"; inconsistent implementations of the draft HTML 5 specification and immature tooling make building HTML 5 apps that work consistently across browsers and operating systems a real challenge. Furthermore, this "either/or" scenario is driven only by vendor politics, not by developer realities. Ultimately, HTML 5 and RIA platforms will be complementary technologies, and enterprise development shops will need to invest in both approaches to deliver expressive applications that combine reach and richness.”
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/does_html_5_herald_end_of_ria/q/id/56768/t/2
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A thoughtful piece by David Arno on the status of JavaScript in the landscape of languages (he takes a dim view of JavaScript). Having never liked JavaScript myself, I am appreciative of someone more versed in the subject highlighting the shortcomings in language-design terms.
http://www.davidarno.org/2010/05/18/why-javascript-is-a-toy-language/
Excerpt: For me this quote from [Doug Crockford] summed it all up: “JavaScript became the world’s biggest programming language completely independent of its merits.”
Scott Rehorn made a good point today, saying that it’s a shame browsers picked on an actual dialect to make the standard, rather than supporting some kind of CLI (Common Language Interface) mechanism with the ability to easily (and in an extensible manner) support different language dialects that play in to the CLI.
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I’ve been out in Madison WI this week on a big pow-wow with the development team. Ken and I snuck off today to check out Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful “Unitarian Meeting House.” Here’s me standing in front of what is “recognized as one of the world's most innovative examples of church architecture”
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