Bears

As a hobbyist programmer and occasional developer, I am sometimes tempted to

reflect about the rapid progress within development itself ie on the evolution

of programming languages and practices. No doubt some hollow-cheeked university

professor of the future will detail things with great accuracy, but from the heat of the

action, and gleaning things from the Internet, some tantalizing indices of the story to be told do stand out.

Tech journalists make many observations in terms of market shares and device capabilities, but let’s take a look from another perspective. The following is from a Wall-Mart ad for a 220$C 7-inch Nexus with ‘only’ 16G of storage.

The ad nails the coffin: it doesn’t run Windows, doesn’t replace a real computer; it is an 

entertainment on-the-go device. I dare say they are right. Something that runs Candy

Crush Saga would have been a formidable computer in the year 2000, because we were enamored of the computer as such. Today, we are meant to be blasé and oriented

to the app that runs on it, which we consume. Quite a difference.

Team Cupertino - the makers of those wonderful Apple products - have been marketing 

the entertainment value of various devices for quite a while. And in fact, their tablets are 

computers in the full sense of the word. Here is a description of some of the wonders on

an Apple computer, carefully hidden on their minimalist Web site lest some deluded

youngster realize what an amazing educational device he had gotten for his birthday.

                                                                       

I have literally spent years on Grapher, building up a visual notion of mathematical

relationships. A keyboard on Garage Band allows one to tweek performance to a 

level only dreamt of by Glen Gould. Beyond awesome!!

Microsoft, for their part, are currently portrayed as the maiden aunt of the industry, with

sensible products. They do offer a low-cost tablet, and a full Windows computer at twice the 

price. But in point of fact, Auntie is the wrong scenario. Microsoft is the Papa Bear of the story, 

consolidating advances for the business community and now - given the

emergence of cloud computing - offering a planetary string of storage centers. What

begins as a breakthrough in development ends up, with MSoft as purveyers of software

as a service, as a form of fully articulated, certifiable expertise. To point: 

The Dotnet presentation of data binding is the best I have seen: clear, systematic,

dirt-simple when you actually understand what is going on. (Whereas going straight to

a library can bring a newbie to tears, there are so many twists and possibilities). But hey, 

that’s just me. I need to know what it is, not the inside dope and pitfall avoidance strategies 

which is what the professional’s library offers.

Yet data binding has a history, through work dome with server-hosted libraries on the one 

hand, and dev efforts on the part of the Java community to develop a stable approach for Beans. 

Somebody exlain it to me...