On Jun 18, 2013, at 12:26 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Gary Schiltz <g...@naturesvisualarts.com>
> wrote:
>
> On a tangential note, I'm trying to come out of retirement (sabbatical :-)
> after about five years, and whoa, it's incredible how much has changed, even
> though I've tried to stay more or less current the whole time. Forget
> SourceForge, it's all on GitHub now! Does anyone even consider the
> possibility that a user might have JavaScript disabled in their browser? You
> wouldn't get very far these days. What's this cloud thing again? Makes me
> want to give up and go back to watching X-Files reruns :-)
>
> I hear you! Steve G and I have been discussing this relative to SimTable and
> AgentScript. Its a race to just stay in place.
>
> But even here there is a core that is pretty solid. Git has replaced source
> control and is pretty understandable, more so than the others when you get
> that it really is a file system of sorts, with all the usual create, rm/mv,
> file/folder, etc components. Github does throw in a wrinkle or two.
I was mainly commenting on the fact that I have a whole lot of catching up to
do. Actually, I'm really excited about the internet landscape of 2013, and I'm
pretty sure I prefer it to the landscape I left in 2008.
> This is one of the reasons for wedtech. We need to know what we don't know.
> And then we need help distributing the load. We've gotten so there are local
> experts on git, webgl, html5/css3 and so on.
>
> More importantly, there is one huge simplification if you fit it: javascript.
> It is now the client (browser & apps & phones/tvs), the server (nodejs), and
> the network (async IO with JSON). I recently experience this when I wanted
> to make AgentScript.org more easily managed. I graduated from a simple
> coffeescript build command and a few bash scripts, to a coffeescript based
> "make" called, naturally, cake. It was completely familiar because it was
> javascript/coffeescript all the way down.
>
> So in one area, programming, its actually getting less complex.
It does seem that the internet ecosystem is settling down rather nicely, with
emphasis on standards (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, RDF (maybe)). Personally, I'm a
Lisp fan, and these days it's possible to use Clojure server-side (it compiled
to JVM byte code) and ClojureScript client-side (it compiles via Google Closure
to optimized, minimized JavaScript). But then, paraphrasing a popular Ruby
article from half a dozen years ago, I can see how "JavaScript is an Acceptable
Lisp". And with a more open ecosystem, I don't have to choose what is an
"Acceptable Lisp", but write in whatever language that gets compiled to HTML,
CSS, JavaScript, RDF.
;; Gary
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