TGIF

Thank God It’s Friday – a perfect time to relax and put out few thoughts about programming languages. Not surprisingly, I often come across as a language bigot, which I really am not. It’s not my fault that there’s so many lousy languages, and only one True One ;-). Just kidding – I actually wrote few Python lines of code a couple of years ago and – liked it.

Seriously, when I think a bit more about what is it exactly that ties me to C++, I concluded that the most important things are independence from any proprietary lock-in and low performance price paid for abstraction. Don’t get me wrong about lock-in – it’s not the money I’m against – I have no problem with people charging for software or related development/suport services, after all I am doing it myself. But I want my freedom to get out of it if I choose. When I see an attempt to cleverly lure, lock me in and then engage in extortion scheme knowing I have no choice but pay, I am out of there. I have recently attended a presentation about a major car manufacturing facility information system that is 100% MS VB. Presenter said the choice was smart because “things are really smooth and easy with VB”. My language bias aside, I could not help but wonder whether his opinion had anything to do with the fact that he is working for the contracting company supplying software development and maintenance services to the mentioned manufacturer – all viewed in the light of the fact that most of their recent income is generated because MS has desupported VB, so everything must be ported to VB.NET. I am truly grateful to the C++ standard body for paying so much attention to backward (and C) compatibility. Especially since they are not paid for it. And then, to be quite honest, I am also thankful (believe it or not) to – Microsoft. I think their support for C++ has helped a lot to keep C++ alive. Needless to say, they’ll have to look elsewhere for their proprietary extensions victim, though.
As I have mentioned already somewhere, I have been using Poco for about year and a half at work, in school and more (sometimes I really I think I need a life 😉 ). The more I use poco, the more I like it. I had no problem with it when it was not “free” and I personally did not see the big issue with eventually being required to pay for it if I’d want to venture into making money with it and deny the rest of the world to peek into my code. During this year and a half, I wrote 3 relatively small apps at work to see how does poco do in real world (steel manufacturing material tracking and process control) and they run as a charm – “set it and forget it” in its best – we are currently considering a major port of a significant portion of legacy code to Poco platform. I have also started two projects on my own time. These projects will be open sourced, well … soon (gotta go get a life first) – I’m currently waiting for 1.2 release to polish and actually launch the first project – dubbed Molto – a 2.4 Sun servlet specification compatible Poco-based container. Stay tuned …