Long time, no post

Writing blog posts seems to require a certain emotional threshold to be crossed. No wonder micro-blogging is really popular, no real thresholds to cross there, visiting the restroom constitutes a post. Rank amateur bloggers like me have to expend quite a bit of effort in writing a post (even with posts that reflect the amateurishness), that effort requires some emotional energy. That emotional energy, I would argue seems to come more easily when a person is frustrated or angry. The next time you read a bunch of blog posts, try to gauge the emotion behind the post, count the number that you think were not fed by frustration or anger (anywhere in the spectrum from mildly peeved to a foul rant counts). In fact, some of the funniest posts are rants, nothing like an expletive to let off steam.

I have been working solo for the last few months using Erlang and Flex/Actionscript. The technologies I have been working with (especially Erlang) have been an absolute pleasure. Flex tends to be big and bulky, with APIs running amok, lots of choices to do the same thing, but somehow it all hangs together very nicely.

So, why this post ? Well, some of my old frustrations came to the fore when I saw this new language fan. More specifically, when I read a few lines describing the features in the language – REST oriented transactional memory. Reading further, I came across this line – Resources may be mounted into a common Uri namespace as a “shared whiteboard”.

What does this have to do with my frustration ? In one of my projects in the past, I proposed this very same idea and met with the most unreasonable resistance I have ever come across. Resistance that would have required plenty of machiavellian tact to overcome, something I did not have the inclination for at the time.

This is what is so great about open source, a movement I feel guilty for not having participated in so far. I hope to remedy that in the future. I hope Fan succeeds, they have some very good ideas (including message passing concurrency based on Erlang). Even if Fan does not succeed, I hope ideas like REST oriented transactional memory have a shot at gaining acceptance. I am now emotionally vested in seeing this idea survive, may it live long and prosper.