It’s been a while. :) So, I ended up buying a Mac Mini, and last week I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs so I’m sitting pretty well right now. (With the original 512 megs the Mini had at first, things were dog slow, especially when I tried to run Photoshop or InDesign. But now it’s quite fast. I am happy. :))

In other news, at work I’ve been coding a board game in Flash. It’s effectively my first Flash project ever (years and years ago I edited a company map in Flash, but it was so long ago that I can hardly remember it, and I was only maintaining it, so it doesn’t really count). Flash is smooth. I’m not completely satisfied with ActionScript, but it certainly works well enough, and I’m sure more experience with it will make it better. Overall, my time with Flash has been good and fun.

Finally, I’m hoping to get back into more Ruby/Python/Perl coding before too long. My new job’ll require some XML magic, for which I’ll probably use Python and XSLT. And in my typographical work on the side I’ll be doing a lot with TeX and either Ruby or Python.

All of which is to say, hopefully I’ll start blogging here more often. :)

After a month of OpenLaszlo, I’ve had enough. Coding in XML just isn’t my style, I’m afraid. (And yes, I know you do half the coding in JavaScript, but that doesn’t change anything.) I don’t think that means XML-based programming languages are inferior or anything like that — if I spent more time wrapping my head around OpenLaszlo, I could probably feel better about it (or I’d have one heck of a sore head). But I don’t have that kind of time. Nor was I getting enough of a “coolness” factor, the way I do when I work with Lisp. This experiment leads me to suspect that I probably wouldn’t like Flex much, either.

So, I’m going back to the basics. Simplicity is good, and so I’ve taken the app I’m working on and pared it down as far as possible. So far, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do the whole thing with Javascript, HTML, and CSS, with a web service providing a connection to the server (written in ASP.NET most likely, though I’d prefer Python and may end up going that route), and anything else in Python. I might use MochiKit or Dojo to make the Javascript end easier to code, but I’m not sure yet if I really need it. (Why not Rails? Well, the server is unfortunately a Windows box running IIS, and I’ve heard that Rails doesn’t perform all that well on IIS. I wish I could get the server moved to Linux, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, Python is still very nice to work with, and I haven’t caught wind of any performance issues with it on IIS.)

At any rate, this stack feels a lot better. When I was working with OpenLaszlo, I felt like I was in a straitjacket. Not much fun. Or “open.” (Again, keep in mind that these are subjective impressions; who knows, maybe OpenLaszlo is your style.)

In the meantime, I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp and liking it.

Technorati Tags: OpenLaszlo, Flex, Javascript, XML, Lisp, Python, MochiKit, Dojo, Paul Graham

Here at work we use ASP.NET, doing most of our coding in VB.NET. After a year and half of this, can I just say that I feel like VB.NET is rotting my brain? Sure, it’s a real language, but the more I use it the dumber I feel, like I’m not really programming at all. On the other hand, when I code in Python or Perl or Ruby (not that I’ve done all that much coding in any of these, but I’m starting to), I feel smarter. Is this just an anti-Microsoft emotional reflex, or is there something to it? I don’t know. I doubt it’s actually anti-Microsoft, because C# feels like more of a real language (and I can’t really say anything about it because I haven’t looked at it at all).

Regardless, I do know that I’d much rather code in Ruby or Python than in VB. Life is precious — why punish oneself? Oh, yeah, because that’s what everything runs on at work. ~sigh~ It’d be nice to convert everything over to Ruby on Rails, but alas, it’s probably not going to happen here.

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET, VB.NET, Python, Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails