Matt’s Musings

Not to show my age, but my college started us out programming in C, not Java.  After a few classes of that, we were allowed to take a class called Object Oriented Paradigm, which was really shorthand for Booch’s notation and C++.  My first job out of college involved C to a degree and then I spent 4 more years doing C and C++.  All the while, I managed to keep a small CircleMUD code base (written in C) going in my spare time.  All in all, I loved it.  However, there were problems.  At the time, I was building ground control software using the Motif toolkit and Roguewave libraries.  The requirements for the software we were building often necessitated sophisticated controls.  Motif was many things, sophisticated (in modern 2001 terms) was not one of them.  We were spending the better part of our development time on trying to compensate for sub-par libraries.

At that point in time, Java had really just started taking off.  I did some research and wrote some prototype user interfaces (using AWT at first and later Swing).  Selling an entity that is not accustomed to change on rewriting the ground control software for an entire installation was largely an uphill battle, but one that we won.  We were able to show (with solid metrics) that developers would be more productive using Java for non-real time systems and be capable of building more sophisticated interfaces and applications in less time.  It was a great success that came with a free side of portability.

As my career progressed, I found myself working on enterprise scale web applications.  Specifically, I was usually working on the server code, but periodically ventured into the client code as well.  The client code we were writing was using the Struts framework.  For the life of me, it felt like everything I did required me to do something to make Struts happy.  Everything seemed like a chore - the framework could not get out of its own way.  I opted to look elsewhere and found Ruby and Rails.  The Ruby language is elegant, easy to work with, and has an amazingly complete library at its disposal.  The Rails framework makes development of web applications almost trivial (well, as trivial as it can be).

I woke up the other morning with a certain irrational desire.  For some strange reason, I find myself longing to dabble in the dark arts of C and C++ again.  I miss screwing with pointers and memory allocation.  I miss compiling.  Not generating byte code, but real honest to goodness compiling.  I did some looking around and re-experimenting with distro’s and discovered that openSUSE 11.1 and KDE 4.1 is hot!  Really hot!  Dig this:

Hot, right?!?

I spent some time this weekend dusting off my tomes on C, C++, sockets, semaphores, and shared memory.  Over the next few months, I am going to spend some time looking at the KDE libraries and will hopefully love what I find

fun C++, irrational, KDE, openSUSE