The World is Pixels!

Javascript… the new Java

It seems like Javascript has just been growing at an unprecedented rate these days and that there are frameworks and tools that allow you to do just about anything you can image, immeasurably better than you could’ve done on your own.  

Java used to be the hot shit on the block, like in the nineties or something… and it was the programming language of the future.  Incredibly secure and robust with its own VM, and perfectly portable so everyone who’s anyone can enjoi the fruits of the Java gods. With a slew of tools and libraries to do just about anything you can imag… Well you get the idea.  All of this bequeath upon the world from the generous bossom of Sun (now Oracle) for the good of all person-kind.  Except that they kept the doors closed on their magic box of wonder (lets be real, that’s all the JVM really is) to protect the people from themselves. 

Enter Javascript: A bastard language that was throw together from all the leftover parts of forgotten languages to try and combine all of the uniqueness of computer science up until this day and age, oh, and to be a practical tool to hack together the computer of yesterday’s tomorrow… the WWW.  Fast forward to -> the future (e.g. now! we’re livin’ in it. ya know. the future.) where the web is king, the browsers of today are valiant knights of the court, and the general public is a naive conglomerate of peasants.  The knights protect us from the other evil doers from other kingdoms (domains of scary XSS) all in the name of the glorious king (the free and beautiful web).

With a race constantly in flux between all the major browser vendors, the technology has grown at breakneck pace and each has their own engine (Google’s got a V8… vrroommm vrrrrooommmmm) that is powering the language of the future’s yesterday, JAVASCRIPT!!  The power that lies in the language emerges out of it’s universal portability (from it’s VM) and acceptance, an cornucopia of libraries and frameworks, and security? (a stretch, I know. but hey I thought I’d give it a try).  Things are starting to sound very familiar.  What Java has done for the Enterprise world of the nineties that powered server farms and desktop application, Javascript aims to do for the web.  

The difference: Javascript is open to the world through countless open source projects and libraries that can be molded and modified by the people who use them.  Instead of one king who thinks he knows what is best for his people and provides a very nice API for accessing that, Javascript is a democracy, a nebulous force that is no where and everywhere. 

Computing has fundamentally changed, both in how we understand it and how we perform it, and the future lies in the clouds somewhere… or our heads are in the web… err we live in a distributed world of distribution…

 Soon enough the kingdom of Java will be barren and waifish and all the people of the land will flock to the prosperous lands in the distance.  Here’s to the future, and getting there the fastest on chariots of fire.

An Asynchronous Life

So many people have recently been diving into asynchrony as hot new technologies are coming into the limelight such as Node.js, event driven programming (Twisted and EventMachine), and parallelism (of any form).  This phenomenon (the asynchrony) has also been greatly accelerated by distributed networks and cloud programming since time loses some of its (traditional) meaning when your process depends on 100s and 1000s of separate and (dare I say) autonomous machines all working together.

But asynchrony and its perils are not new, and not specific to computers and networks.  A funny little thing happened to me the other day: On Saturday morning my friend asked if I had any plans for the weekend and at the time I had none.  Shortly thereafter another friend asked me if I wanted to have lunch on Sunday, and I had a little bit of a data race.  I just told my friend I had no plans, and worried that she started planning something to do with me (possibly on Sunday) I told my other friend the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time: “I might have plans with another friend, but I am not sure, but I really want to have lunch with you, but its not that I am trying to get out of it, but maybe, but maybe not…”

I wish I could have just told her that my total order is all out of whack.  So when multiple autonomous agents each have their own clocks and, while each might be perfectly ordered according to themselves, the timeline of events can exhibit anomalous behavior when the agents are not properly synchronized.  Oh… my asynchronous life.