There’s a continuous revolution taking place in web development as platforms and tools evolved first to handle dynamic pages and now cloud services. But sometimes what goes around comes around so I’m predicting a resurgence of Java and Java-like languages as rotating storage goes into decline. Here’s why.
In the beginning of the web we wrote web apps with Perl and C++ because that’s all we had. This sucked.
C++ is awesome for anything requiring intense performance but because it operates at a comparatively low level (closer to the silicon) C++ is very hard for dopes like me to use. And in a way it’s an insult to the language, which gets bored waiting for databases and […]
With more than 200 reader comments submitted already it is clear that my column from earlier this week about America’s next frontier is a hot topic. I asked readers to tell me what they thought would be (should be) our next area of national expansion and the responses ranged from single words to essays and I learned a lot from all of them. But this is such a fertile and complex topic that no one reader (or even one columnist — me) can be expected to encompass it all in a single session, but we can try and will, right here, right now.
A lot has been said about Steve Jobs in the 24 hours since his death and some of that has come from me. It has been 24 hours of round-the-world media interviews, most of them live but you can see an edited version of me this Friday on ABC’s 20/20, which is doing a Jobs tribute of some sort. Remember ABC’s parent is Disney and Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder. With all that has been said and written, however, I’m hard put to know what there is I can add here. I can tell you though the two Jobs questions I still want answers for, and where I hope to find those answers.
When I was in school we had the occasional class discussion in history or social studies about the role of the frontier in U.S. economic development. Back then (this was the 1960s) if the teacher was sharp this would sometimes segue into a discussion about the implications for America of being without an obvious frontier — a condition that was widely known even then. Those conversations have stilled for some reason with the rise of what seems to me to be societal stupidity, but it is my growing sense that this is at the heart of our current economic malaise. We need a new frontier.