On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Mike Copeland mike@ggisoft.com wrote:
Just throwing it out there...curious what the pulse is and where things seem to be going in mid-2016. Have a great weekend!
JavaScript is The Next Big Thing two years ago, which means it's finally maturing and improving in compatibility (i.e., Microsoft is finally catching up.) There's a lot of cool stuff happening in this old language.
Virtual/container/boxes are all the rage, essentially chroot without the difficulties. "Those who fail to appreciate the mainframe are doomed to reinvent them."
Ruby is an updated and prettier Perl, a fun language imo. I would like to see more commandline and GUI toolkits for Ruby, like Dabo on Python.
Important to note Rails is not Ruby and Ruby not rails. Think Foundation classes vs. Visual Foxpro. The Rails 5 folks have made a pretty incredible framework, but Rails needs constant upkeep and maintenance. If you are going to build the World's Greatest Website and employ a team to continuously improve it, Rails is great. If your business model is more "build something for a client and check in with them every couple of months, upgrade every three years" Rails is NOT the system for you. It's the High-Maintenance Boy/Girlfriend of frameworks; the benefits are great, but the upkeep is a chore.
Python is an elegant language with a lot of support up and down the application spectrum, from desktop single-user to complex distributed client-server stuff.
I know Kevin's a big Xojo fan and more power to him, but I just think the proprietary model is difficult for the vendor and the developer/user to arrive at a commercial balance that works for both of them. If you pay $795 and can use it all over the world forever, the vendor can't make money supporting it. And if you have to pay $95 per year per installation, it eliminates entire classes of software solutions due to the expense. And, of course, there's always the threat that the vendor will decide to rewrite their product in Visual Pascal or J##.