Since the excellent Joel on Software no longer accepts comments, I decided to comment on his latest post here.

In his post, Joel explains how the current state of AJAX web-app development has many parallels with desktop app development back in the 90’s. Joel makes a breathless prediction of a future event that will revolutionize web-app development:

What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “nativeâ€? code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compile writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. […] Oh joyous day that will be.

Sound like anything you can think of? Someone needs to tell Joel his mythical programming language already exists: it’s called ActionScript. Admittedly ActionScript does not compile down to JavaScript and DOMs, but otherwise it matches his description perfectly.

Here’s another quote that seems to be talking about Flex/Flash/Actionscript:

Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.

Sounds like it’s a good time to be an ActionScript developer.

Robert Hodgin has released a fantastic iTunes visualizer, based on his mind-blowing processing experiments. I’ve never been a fan of visualizers in the past, probably because they typically look like something from an early 70’s sci-fi TV show (and not in a good way). In contrast this thing is all smooth organic 3-d motion and lovely glowing orbs.