Peter Wooley’s Blog

I’m running out of podcasts to listen to on my commute. With two hours of driving every day, I’m managing to burn through more audio than I ever have. Currently, my favorites are StackOverflow, Software Engineering Radio, and Hanselminutes. I’ve been catching TWiT Live, but haven’t clicked the three buttons it would take to subscribe in iTunes.

Given the nearly two months since I started at McAfee, I’ve now officially caught up on everything. Late last week, I tuned to the radio to find something entertaining. There’s a #fail. In the morning, I couldn’t escape the morning shows. In the afternoon, everything sounded the same. In frustration, I ended up turning off the radio and just sitting in silence.

Silence isn’t golden

After two sessions of silence, I realized that I wasn’t just sitting with my thoughts, but rather noticing every sound in and out of my car. My fan makes a really annoying clicking when the dial is set below the 3rd setting. Combustion engines are loud and rumbly—why don’t we have plug-in commuter cars yet? You really shouldn’t buy cars with a light-colored interior; they can’t hide dirt and just look dingy all the time.

Embrace the Classical

Yesterday evening, I remembered that I had skipped one station in my search for listenable radio: 89.9 All Classical. For three trips now, I’ve been listening to the sounds of Strauss, Bach, and other composers I will never remember. Suddenly, I wasn’t listening to my car, or the outside world, or my tangential thoughts, I was thinking about my life, dreams, and goals. (Do note, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the music, sorry Strauss!)

I even came up with a list of things I want to do in the very near future:

1. Build a Social, Browser-based Game
2. Host my own 1U box at a Colo
3. Beat Super Mario Galaxy (I have 35 stars)
4. Write software to make a tangible object move
5. Finish development of a Web App that’ll fulfill a dream
6. Bonus: Hold my newborn baby

Now that I have the content for my drive, I need to figure out how to make the trip shorter so I can get some more work done!

What George Orwell may not have realized when creating 1984’s Newspeak was that a language that could shrink rather than grow might actually be a good idea. For the past two years, Gilad Bracha and a few other folks have been working on a new programming language, called Newspeak, that might actually be able to start off with a mind-bendingly huge feature set, but do it all with just a few brilliant concepts and stay remarkably small in the process.

Josh, a co-worker of mine and a Serial Language Enthusiast, let me know about this new development. Part Smalltalk, a splash of Beta, a helping of Self, and a sprinkling of Pixie Dust makes this language one to take a look at. In Episode 140 of Software Engineering Radio, Gilad explained the concepts of the language. Three things jumped out at me:

1. Class hierarchies, as in Classes within classes within classes. Classes, Modules, Namespaces, and Mixins are all handled with the same construct. Top-level classes are Namespaces and you can have multiple instances of these as Modules—giving you side-by-side deployments—and Mixins come by default as all parent classes are dynamically set at runtime.
2. Dynamic Typing is used, which I love, but they’re working on implementing Pluggable Types, an optional typing system that will allow custom type grammars. Though, keeping a dynamic runtime, the types will only be checked at compile time, which is basically the opposite of ActionScript 3 running without strict mode.
3. Network Aware. The language knows the Internet, as indicated on the Newspeak homepage:
   

   …we believe in a notion of service oriented computing that allows for off-line operation and leverages the inherent advantages of client devices, while utilizing the strengths of the network.

For someone working on the web, this is exciting stuff. Going beyond simply being aware of the network, Newspeak will not only sync with data from the cloud, but with the entire application—running application code client-side. It’ll be like updating the latest version of TweetDeck through AIR’s update system, but only the modified application objects and data will be sent over the wire. Now this next part is purely conjecture, but as multicore processing will be a focus of Newspeak, an implementation of Erlang-style actors may not be out of the question, and hot-swappable code could make the entire update process as smooth as butter.

What I have to disagree with

From Episode 140 of Software Engineering Radio (starting at 2:06), Gilad says,

The real goal of Newspeak is to create a really nice environment where you can program for the  web without worrying about the web, without dealing with all the mechanics of different languages: CSS, HTML, DOM, Database back-end, whatever. In general, to create a language—not just to run in a web browser—but a language for a network world.

Hold it right there! Newspeak sounds like a great idea, but I’m not convinced it will allow people to “program for the web without worrying about the web.” If anything, this sounds like ASP.NET and its automagic markup, styles, and scripts that makes kittens cry. While the day may come when HTML will be treated as the Assembly language of the Web, we are far from it. With so many browsers, so many brand new ideas, and so much further to go in nearly every aspect, from content, accessibility, features, and speed, we’ll be lucky if we get there by 2030, when IE finally implements the CSS3 Template Layout Module.

By then, I will most likely be the old, cantankerous coot that still remembers the days when developers knew why you put the <script /> at the bottom and how to style a <ul /> to make drop-down navigation without JavaScript. But, with HTML5 still on its way and CSS3 being slowly implemented module-after-module, I doubt I’ll have to be very cantankerous anytime soon. Until then, I’ll be playing with a new language and seeing what this Internet fad can really do—even if it isn’t reinvented by Newspeak.

As you have no doubt heard, Tyler Sticka has announced that he will be leaving McAfee. Many of you know that Tyler and I attended the Art Institute of Portland together and, since then, we formed the first Interaction Design team at US Digital (along with Erik Jung), taught at the Art Institute of Portland, and were working closely on Enterprise software at McAfee.

Designing and developing with Tyler is an exhilarating experience. He’s quick, thoughtful, and engaging—and I know he’ll continue to go further as he takes his next step.

With our history, I imagine some might think I’ll be leaving to join Tyler in the near future. I want to say that, while working with Tyler is a ton of fun, I have no plans to leave McAfee. My current role has been, and is, an exciting challenge. With just over a month and a half under my belt, I’m enjoying both the people and code I get to develop with. The five day work weeks have been a little tough to get used to, along with the commute, but free soda and fast-paced, testable, continuously-integrated web development is awesome.

While we may not be working under the same roof, do not fret; professionally we are not done.