Well, well...

[Nick Sabalausky]

"James K Smith" <jksmith at dx-machine.com> wrote in message 
news:f8rk7u$271m$1 at digitalmars.com...
> I've been blathering for about two years over in Delphi land that the next
> big thing in computing was the internet as a platform in and of itself - 
> the
> OS is reduced to another backend, like a db server, whatever. The remote 
> end
> user will give a crap less what OS is hosting the app, as long as that app
> meets expectations. To make the internet fully realized, two issues have 
> to
> be addressed:
>
> 1) Proof of correctness in code. The days of no real or implied liability
> are coming to an end, because even trivial  applications become
> mission-critical when they are service providers. Extensive use of unit
> testing and contract programming show best effort on behalf of the
> manufacturer, which an educated business community will eventually pay 
> more
> for.
>
> 2) True concurrency instead of just simplistic threads and cores. If a 
> unit
> of computing power is available somewhere, I want the option to be able to
> use it for my app.
>
> I've groaned for these features for quite a while for other languages, and
> even dabbled in Eiffel for a bit, but I've never come across a language 
> that
> has developed so much critical mass for this specific functionality. And
> like icing on the cake, I get array slices back, which I haven't enjoyed
> using since my Stony Brook Modula-2 dos days. It's like somebody asked me
> what I wanted to see in a language and libs without really asking me.
>
> Kudos to Mr. Bright and all the developers working to grow the community.
> And thanks to Code::Blocks actually working with D and ddbg out of the 
> box,
> I'm already coding.
>
> James
>
>

I've always felt that the main thing holding the Internet back from being an 
OS-commoditizing platform are all of the design and implementation flaws in 
all the technologies the web is built on. HTML, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, 
browsers, etc. I could go forever listing problems I have with them, but 
I'll list just a few at random and leave it at that:

1. In HTML, "method" and "action" should be attributes of a submit button 
tag, not attributes of the form tag.

2. Web programming languages need to evolve from the scripting languages 
they are today into real professional languages (like D :) ). 
Dynamic-typing/duck-typing in particular need to go (pet peeve). Most of the 
web scripting languages out there are fine if you’re whipping up “Lil’ Coder’s 
First PHP Page”, but when you have a full-blown web app to maintain, those 
languages just send productivity and reliability straight down the crapper.

3. BROWSERS!!! Arrgghh!

(Sorry for all the rantyness. I've been trapped in the web application world 
for a number of years now and I think it's draining my last bit of sanity.)

But I do agree that we could use more developments in the area of 
concurrency. And I *strongly* agree on placing a high focus on techniques to 
maximize code reliability. That's something I've focused a lot on lately 
(Reliability and productivity without sacrificing power is what drew me to D 
in the first place).