Joey's Rantings and Ruminations

Rantings and Ruminations

This page exists solely to give me, Joey, a place to vent about all things technology related. There is no order to anything written below. I make no promises that any of what follows makes any sense at all to anyone but myself. So on with the show...

There's nothing new anymore. We just seem to rename and recycle old ideas and concepts.

Old term	New term	Explanation
arpanet	internet	I don't care what Gore says, I remember it as the arpanet.
lan	intranet	I know some people will argue with me about these terms having the same meaning, but let's face it they are close enough that they are used interchangeably.
wan	extranet	I know some people will argue with me about these terms having the same meaning, but let's face it they are close enough that they are used interchangeably.
algorithm	pattern	Yet again, some might argue that there is a difference -- but give me a break.
X terminal	NC	Didn't we learn our lesson already?

Is it me? Or are we actually going backwards in terms of programmer productivity?

I am finding myself more and more using a revamped VI editor and a version of CTAGS for Java just so I can navigate around a large library of source code. When I try to pull the same code into one of the popular IDE's they either crash or don't have the ability to jump around the source code very easily.

GUI builders that generate source code -- have been, are currently, and will always be useless for serious application development. There are several major reasons for this:

Any tweaking of the user interface requires a compilation. This tends to take away the tweaking away from the user interface designers and gives it to the programmers -- not usually the best thing to do.
It tends to bloat the size of the source code. This in turn affects startup performance of the application.
Programmers will always end up modifying the generating source code which makes it impossible to go back to the GUI builder at a later date and get the same results.

Wasn't Java supposed to solve our cross-platform problems?

We are no better off today with Java than with some other C/C++ tools that have been around for years. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that tools like the Galaxy Application Environment or Nueron Data's offerings were did a much better job at getting us closer to a soltion.

And on top of the platform differences, we now have to deal with differences between browsers from the various vendors and even versions of browsers from the same vendor.

If the makers of Java were really interested in promoting standards, why did they create yet another look-and-feel built into Swing?

There were at least 3 "standards" that they could have embraced. Windows, Motif, and MacOS all provide reasonable styles that could have been chosen. No, instead they go off on their own little tangent wasting time and energy when they should have been putting their efforts into bulstering up their core.

And no, I do not accept the argument that the purpose of having the "Java LAF" is for devices that don't yet exist and so therefore don't have a standard to follow.

Let's stop all the Microsoft bashing already, okay.

There is one sure fire way to beat Microsoft if you want -- create better products. Stop whining about unfair competition and start shipping software that does what it claims to do and does it well. Don't complain about Microsoft's attempts at fragmenting the Java and internet communities, and then turn around and do the exact same thing yourselves.

What's in store for Linux?

My bet is that Linux will be a victim of its own success. A couple of years from now there will likely be 4 or 5 different divergent releases of Linux. The more popular it gets, the harder it will be to prevent this divergence.

I'm not saying that Linux is bad, quite the contrary. I think its a really good UNIX implementation and I hope that it stays that way. But I seriously don't that it will.

What makes anyone think that Linux with X11 will make a reasonable client?

X11 is just simply not ready for use by the masses -- and it never will be the way its going. And as different Linux vendors try to make it more palatable by adding new faces to it, the more fragmented the whole Linux market will get.

If you don't understand history, you will be doomed to repeat it.

I am admittedly a dinosaur in the software industry, but I cannot believe how little the new graduates know about the history of computing. Instead of teaching students about basic logic and problem solving the schools appear to be simply teaching the syntax of the latest hot language. Guess what folks, if you understand the underlying concepts then adopting the next best language becomes a trivial task.

A real good example of this the MVC model that Swing uses especially for the JTable and JTree components. I've heard nothing but complaints from young programmers when they try to use Swing to build applications -- us dinosaurs on the otherhand took one look at Swing and said, "Okay, yet another implementation of the basic MVC architecture".

I'm getting really tired of vaporware!

At JaveOne99 I saw an executive from Sun Microsystems show off a Motorola pager that they claimed was using the new PJava VM. Alright! But wait a second folks, when I went to talk to Motorola about their new device they told me that he was only showing a mockup. And when I asked about when the real thing would be shipping the response I got was, "there is no ship date as this is only a concept at this point."