Lonely Lion

I’ve been pleasantly watching the releases of Apollo and Silverlight over the past few days, and just sort of thinking, “oh, nice, new things to play around with.” Then comes Mark Pilgrim with a dose of cranky, yet wildly accurate ranting.

Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying my new found need of Javascript. I’m doing lots of neat AJAX’y things, the sorts of stuff that everyone else was doing months ago, so I’m sort of primed for the argument of, “don’t buy into these corporate re-do’s of the web, stick with the open web…stick…with…the…open…web.”

Sounds good to me, I guess. Yet, at the same time, everytime M$ & Company say the words Ruby or Python, it gets that much easier to say the same words in front of a somewhat backwards potential tech customer and not get booted out the door. So, the tally so far: big companies reinventing the web –, big companies putting good words in press releases ++.

As an aside, please never trim your fingernails at your desk during work hours within earshot of me. It’s really goddamn gross.

So, Vista is languishing (no links provided, seriously you’ve heard this as well as I have). At the same time, Microsoft just released some really cool sounding stuff for dynamic language enthusiasts in the form of some sort of mysterious “Dynamic Language Runtime.” Jon Udell interviewed John Lam about it, as well as how it will integrate with Silverlight.

So, on the one hand, you’ve got the Microsoft that’s sort of doing big dumb things, and on the other hand, you’ve got some really bright types putting out neat stuff that has a lot of potential. Recent neat stuff by Microsoft list: Xbox 360, XNA game dev framework, Robot dev tools, Iron Python, RubyCLR, Silverlight. Nice work good part of Microsoft.