Then after a short history lesson, he speculates that people should stop worrying about the size of their JavaScript and that eventually JavaScript would be compiled to native code a new portable language will appear that can be compiled to JavaScript (did someone tell him about GWT at all?).

What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.

Well, after Paul Graham said that Microsoft is Dead, the only thing I can think of is that Joel has started to believe Paul’s lie, and stopped paying attention to what comes out of Microsoft.

Everyone that is paying attention to Silverlight and has not been blinded by the anti-Microsoft FUD, something that even the Linux Foundation executive director condemns, will realize where Microsoft is heading with the introduction of the DLR, specially if you make the connection between Joel’s post and Managed JScript. I really hope that people will soon take their tinfoil hats off and start paying more attention to what’s coming out of Microsoft, specially since there is an option in Mono, which is a completely open implementation of .NET, and now with Moonlight a JavaScript compiler  will be soon hitting your beloved Linux Desktop anytime now.

And listen, Joel. We don’t need no new stinking portable language that can compile to JavaScript. If we get to write code in our own lovely favorite language, be it Python or even Ruby, being able to access the dreaded DOM and to top it off compile it to native machine code, what could be better than that?

In other news, if you just consider the approach of making JavaScript faster instead of compiling it, you might want to keep an eye on Mozilla’s Tamarin Project. Mum’s the word that some exciting news will be coming out of that in the near future.

I don’t want to convert anyone to using Windows. Nor do I want to argue that some OS is better than other. I just believe in using the right tools for the right job, and most of my job consists on getting stuff done on Windows these days, so I’ve been able to rediscover it, and learnt to love it in the process.

This is a lenghty summary of my roughly 10 years of involvement with computers in general. I hope you don’t get bored from reading it. Most people might identify themselves with the narrative, and others might just ignore it. But it’s my story, and most of what happened through those years serves as a justification of why I came to be who I am today.

For a long time I was a Mac OS user. It all started around 1997 if I recall correctly, when I bought my first laptop, a tangerine iBook. It was about the same time that I started using Linux. Not on the desktop, no. On the server.

I had just started working on an ISP, my second computer-related job. The first one was about maintaining some applications written in Clipper, which I then started porting to Visual Basic 5.

But back to the ISP. My job was to do, erm, everything. I started by learning about this new thing called PHP on my first day. Then I learnt that there was this database called MySQL that you could use with PHP, and that it was really fast and easy to use. For sure it made me forget about my bad experiences with DBase.

I remember the pain that it was to setup Apache + PHP + MySQL back then. Package management existed, but PHP and MySQL were so new that packages did not exist for them. Or at least not the versions that I wanted to install (my memory fools me sometimes).

I was very young at the time, and I remember the pleasure that I had when I ripped off that last NT4 server.

But for quite some time, that was pretty much all that my experience with Linux amounted to. At the same time, I was responsible for doing some design work, and most of that was done on my iBook, with Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

I also had a desktop running Windows 95 with the basically the same applications, but the machine was so old and slow that it pretty much served only as a jukebox, with Winamp and thousands of mp3 files.

For almost two years, that’s what I used. I had a really bad impression about Windows 95, because that machine that I used was so slow and crappy, it would constantly hang or crash. On the other hand, OS 8 and 9 got the job done, and the Linux servers lived on. We got hacked once, cause I forgot to turn the telnet service off. And a disk failed once, and after a painful time with fsck, some 300 email accounts had their guts sprayed through lost+found. Ooops.

Then I left the ISP, to start my own company, X3ng. Some Linux distributions started supporting the PowerPC, so I gave it a try. I got YellowDog Linux into the iBook. I remember it was a very awkward process to do it by the time. There were no bootable CD images at the time I think, and all the HOW-TOs described the installation process using floppies. Floppies on an iBook in 1997? No thanks. :)

Somehow I stumbled upon some documentation describing how to telnet into the OpenFirmware (!) and then net-boot (!!) from a disk image served by TFTP (!!!). Wow, that was wild. Not for the faint of the heart, no.

It was about the same time that I’ve learnt Python, the hard way, through Zope. I believe there was a Python package on YellowDog, because I don’t recall compiling Python itself. Or maybe it was so painful that my mind blocked it. Who knows.

I don’t quite remember what editor I used at the time. I believe it was Quanta. And my email application was KMail. I remember how excited I was when KMail added every new feature. And how slow it was. Poor KMail. Quanta wasn’t exactly the best HTML editor around either. Compared to Dreamweaver, yuck. And I used Konqueror I believe. Constant crashes. Then Firefox came along, and more crashes. I also used XChat.

But YellowDog wasn’t exactly fast at updating packages. And the constant crashes begged for constant updates. Around that time Debian started supporting the PowerPC. I believe bootable CD images existed at this time. And to boot (no pun intended), I needed more space so I replaced the iBook internal drive, and put Debian on it.

Life was much better on Debian. There I discovered Emacs, and mutt, and fetchmail, and ion, and irssi. I turned into a command-line monster. And applied for being a Debian Maintainer. Then gave up. I think that’s where I started to realize that I was spending more time tweaking and configuring my system than doing actual work, but it wasn’t a strong feeling, just something on the back of my mind.

About 3 years into that, I got hold of an used Powerbook Pismo, which was just a little bit more powerful than my iBook. Just enough to boot OS X in a reasonable time. Oh, and how I wanted to run OS X. I really wanted to.

But the machine was just not fast enough, so I made a partition for ‘ol Debian and left OS X on a corner, in the hope that I would go back to it eventually. But there really wasn’t much intersting stuff to do on OS X at the time. I created the first Plone installer for Mac OS X at some point, and that was pretty much the only useful thing I got done on OS X for quite some time. I tried Fink, which gave me that warm feeling of using Debian, but it wasn’t the same thing. I remember that I tried to install some package, and the box went on, churning for some 20 hours until a binary popped out on the other end.

To make a long story short, and this is one of the longest ones I’ve written, I started working at Enfold Systems. And the goal there is really to make Plone work and be a nice and well-behaved Windows citizen.

For quite some time I tried to stay on Linux, but at some point it just didn’t cut it anymore. I would write tests, and they would fail on Windows. I would have to debug something, and it would be running on Windows. I wanted to try some cool new technology, nope, Windows-only. And I, stuck on Debian PowerPC. No Java 1.4, no Flash. Really stuck.

So I bit the bullet. First I borrowed a machine from X3ng, and put Windows XP on it. Then I got a desktop from Enfold. Got good ‘ol Emacs going, and dropped mutt for Gmail. Got used to cmd.exe, it’s not that bad when you get used to it. In fact, every time I go back to bash I miss that tab-completion style. I heard that zsh works similarly, or that it was borrowed from zsh, not sure.

Many open source applications are available for Windows these days. I’ve mentioned Emacs, but notable apps include Firefox, Gaim. Evolution is quite close from working on Windows. I installed it, but it crashed right away. I heard Gimp works on Windows too. There’s some great stuff on SourceForge. Checkout ‘console’, it’s a tabbed terminal written in .NET. Really neat stuff.

I haven’t missed much of the stuff I used on Linux. I was really used to mutt and was hard to give up on it, and irssi, but that is pretty much the only two things that I really miss.

I was stuck on Linux, at least on PowerPC. I didn’t have good Java browser plugin, or Flash. Now I’m on Windows, and I’m happy. I’ve got to keep some of the tools I was used to. And they work on Mac OS X too. I am able to checkout some of the latest trends in technology, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight. I have iTunes. And now Safari too. And Gaim. And Emacs. And even Mono. And they all happily work.

I don’t feel stuck on Windows. I now have a Macbook. The little beast is pretty darn fast. I ordered it with Parallels and Windows XP pre-installed. In retrospect, I haven’t used Mac OS X much since I’ve got this Macbook. Which makes me wonder why I haven’t moved to Bootcamp yet.

Parallels is quite fast. Sometimes I completely forgot that I’m running Windows XP on a virtual machine. One such case was when I installed Skype. Download, setup, login, made a call. Then I realized, “but wait a minute, I’m running this inside Parallels!”. It was *that* transparent. Parallels is really a miracle on its own.

From time to time, I install some new “app du jour” on OS X. Just to then forget about it completely. I sort of have a similar feeling to OS X than I have to Linux. That when I’m on OS X I spend too much time playing with an app here and there and never quite get my job done. I really try to use OS X, but can’t get used to it. Maybe it would work best on a larger monitor. Those large fonts just take too much space on my screen. And lots of windows. I don’t know, just haven’t got used to it.

To be fair, I feel a little bit stuck on Windows at this time. But only because I wanted to move to Vista, but I can’t just yet because I want to wait until Bootcamp supports the x64 bit version. Then I will be a happy camper.

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Which Programming Language are You?

I’m mainly sharping my axe to try and revive nautilus-mono when I get some spare time.