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Showing posts from April, 2010

A brief history of Javascript

Javascript is the ugly duckling that is now ruling the internet. It's now a fully grown ugly arse duck! But you'll respect it because it got a lot right where corporations have failed. Back in 1996 I heard how Netscape was coming out with a new version 2.0 that would include Javascript. Apparently in a deal with Sun Microsystems they renamed it from Livescript and it would allow programming to be embedded into HTML and run in the browser instead of on the server. At this time Netscape defined the web. If you browsed webpages you used netscape. Sure it crashed a lot. Yes it ran out of memory when some punk decided a page with 12 frames would be cool. But if you used anything else you were missing out on the full glory of the web. So when Netscape said they were doing something cool for the internet you listened with equal interest, excitement and doubt. Sounded like a toy. Netscape already messed up websites with the damn <BLINK> tag. Sure you could have some nice effects

C++ sucks part two

You like speed? C++ will not get any faster Because C++ support for multi-threading is lackluster. You've pretty much got to roll your own carefully constructed tools to avoid even the most common mistakes multi-threading can introduce. "What about C++0x ?" I hear you say. Screw that! Sure a lot of the stuff being proposed is a huge improvement. But it's been sitting around since 98. When am I going to see this in a compiler? When can I use it? I'm slowly dying here as processors get more and more cores. To write a program in C++ today is to write code that will never run faster. Or will probably crash trying. You like speed? C++ build times will feel like riding the bus Builds are sooo slow. While trivial programs can build from scratch in seconds. Typical programs can take minutes to build from scratch. Complex programs can take so long to build it's usually farmed off to servers to do a 'nightly build'. Let's do some math. Assume a program take