Xavier Defrang

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1. aikii said 10 days later:
   

   I just checked out flex screencast http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp/ . Looks like another horrible tag soup. Isn't that really coldfusion 2.0 ? if you're able to code html you can program in a language where everything is a tag ... so welcome to flex ! If you know XML, you know about programming too. Yikes, get out of here ...

   ( no wonder I heard immoweb.be gave up trying to refurbish their website ... made in coldfusion )

   Looks strange: I don't feel like learning another programming language again ... if it hasn't any real business use where it's better than anything else. Yeah, even if gurus say it's the language for the next decade ( btw, good luck trying to convince me leaving RoR for something better in web development ).

   Am I rotting or evolving ? ;-)

   Have fun with smalltalk, anyway. I'll be glad to read any discover you make!

2. Xavier said 10 days later:
   

   I'm absolutely not convinced by Flex neither, the technology is unusable without their IDE.
   Flash front-ends may have a niche but the whole framework looks way too enterprisey.

   I find data-driven Flash movies (used e.g. for data visualization) much easier to integrate with
   existing backend, especially if you build your app the RESTful way. Same goes for handling
   complex or multimedia user input, in nearly all cases, a simple web call will do the trick.

   I had a bit the same feeling you have when I really got deep into Ruby, I just felt home.
   This was the language I had been waiting for. And it's still the language that allows me
   to work like I always wanted to work. When I'm writing Ruby code, I'm not piling Lego bricks,
   I'm playing with Play-Doh! :)

   But I always found inspiration in other languages and technologies. For instance, I find the Cocoa
   framework an invaluable source of inspiration for designing UI models even for web apps!

   I don't actually plan to spend my whole sparetime writing SmallTalk programs, I'm just reading
   books for now. The first thing that struck me was how Ruby was inspired by the SmallTalk model.
   They even share the same vocabulary (like "respond to") or syntax (like the arguments between pipes).

   From what I've read so far, SmallTalk really feels like the LISP of Object-Oriented languages.
   A simple and well defined dynamic language which makes it relatively easy to write a bullet-proof
   runtime environment for it.

   But SmallTalk has a major downside, it's syntax was designed to please lexical analyzers, not humans.
   This alone will stop me from considering writing actual code in this language, I'll be already happy
   with what I learn from its design and philosophy!

3. aikii said 11 days later:
   

   Funny thought about ruby : every time I read blog posts about its syntax, people are happy to leave C-like syntax for a more english-like syntax. And that's about the same thing you read on the venerable Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper's wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper ) :

   "it was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time"

   Indeed this philosophy was used to invent ... COBOL ;-) I guess we have to admit that's the very same intend that lead both languages' syntax. But COBOL couldn't be based on any past experience, while ruby appeared 40 years later .. for sure, we have to blame the industry in the first place for its poor choices, not the inventors. I guess the same thing can be said about flash/flex's uses. I wish I could have some fun with it, like the guys at digg : http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

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