Back in Techie Mood

[Zaldy O. Co]

Spent the day downloading various VCLs, Windows XP SP3, two Chinese learning ebooks--Colloquial Chinese and Rapid Literacy in Chinese, and a single user license of DBA Manufacturing NextGen.

I have been working with the same technology for almost a decade and there is not much excitement around the scene for the last few years. I came across this DDJ article Programming Languages: Everyone Has a Favorite One and picked up from the newsgroups DBA Manufacturing NextGen. From the DDJ article, I expect in five years time there will be two main languages: Java and C#, closely followed by good-old Visual Basic. There is no new paradigm foreseen.

I have to learn to love hearing Visual Basic. My favorite programming language Delphi serves the same application and technology market as VB but has a much richer 3rd-party toolset, runs very nicely in Linux under Wine, and is still being updated. DBA Manufacturing NextGen seems to be a throwback to the late '80's, early '90's paradigm of applications--easy to use, easy to deploy, minimal support, and reasonable pricing. I have always thought there are lots of forgotten technologies and paradigms that could be revived and thrive today. Big ERP companies have detached themselves from the SME market with their big price tags and there is really a market and not a niche to be filled.

External sources like the press usually generates the excitement. The excitement here, the possibilities, should come from my own mind. I have to get back to the rockstar and garage mindset of the early days of Jobs and Wozniak.