Any Mac geek should read John Welch’s blog. Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, he typically has a point, and is almost always comical and profane. Some of his posts of the last week (I was behind on my news feed and was trying to catch up tonight) have been downright hilarious and bang-on as far as bitches and gripes go. I spent many days weeping at my desk over Adobe‘s sheer and utter failure to at least listen to Apple’s programming guidelines, let alone their deployment, packaging, scripting, etc guidelines. I pity their Mac team, as they seem to have lost their spirit to produce a good product and only want to produce ports of Windows apps, and bad ports at that.
The trackback linked here isn’t about Adobe, even though that topic is near and dear to my heart / jar of anthrax and box of envelops, its his recent article on how languages, both programming and scripting, aren’t the issue, its how they’re supported and the environments we’re forced to use to develop in that create the major hurdles. A great read for anybody smart enough to agree that there is no ‘magic bullet’ language, and that being proficient in as many as you can manage and need to accomplish your job is all that really matters. Between rudimentary C, Java, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Applescript, a dabbling of Python and Ruby, and beginning into ObjC, I’m trying to cover as many of my bases as I can. One day I might even install Visual Studio (in a VM) and play with .NET again (last time that happened was 2003), though it will have to be a particularly long stretch of boredom before that happens…