hejsna

Nice article and I agree with most of it - it's very hard to find a framework that strikes a good balance between lean and full-featured. But I don't think the answer is writing everything yourself, either. Rolling your own framework is a lot of work and you're not even guaranteed to wind up with something better than what's out there. Some people believe jQuery is bloated and create their own framework with a mix-and-match from microjs.com. Great! But it's super painful to work with, because at some point you realize "oh, i need to deep-copy this object" or "this should slide down - oh wait" and suddenly you're re-inventing wheels all over the place. With your own subtle browser bugs, Unicode issues, and keyboard problems. Ugh. Especially when you're going to replace things like socket.io, mentioned in the article.

But I'm on board with the general concept here and I'm not sold on Ember or Angular - they don't seem to speed up development or prevent bugs as much as they should, per kb downloaded to the client. Sometimes all you need is plain-old jQuery code, with a well thought out and structured API.

It seemed like most of his slides came down to the old typed/untyped flame war. Yes, in Scala you can look at your objects in an IDE and be told what type they are, in Ruby you can't. Some organizations and people need that, some don't. And yes, it's easier to optimize typed languages. Some applications need that extra speed, most don't.

I'm happy he found a language he enjoys working with, but I doubt this will change anyone's mind...

Good advice! I tend to unfollow people who tweet publicly more than ten times a day - they're hogging my mental bandwidth. Good thing about today's social networks is you can set your filters accordingly. Excessive bragging will get you hidden in my facebook feed, too.

I just use different browsers. Chrome for the personal one, Firefox for the work one. Very easy, just Cmd+Tab between them, can always stay signed in, and no confusion!

The best way to spend any extra money saved on retiring MSN: open up the Skype API for devs to use. Adium is still the undisputed king of IM clients and with a proper Skype plugin for it I'd be happy again. Because let's face it, the Skype client is really, really bad.

Your point 4 is exceedingly optimistic. The environment won't "recover". It will certainly reach a stable equilibrium, but that equilibrium may well be something we, as a species, won't particularly like or thrive in.

While we're talking arable land, we need to consider that the majority of the land that could be deployed as farmland is home to a whole host of ecosystem services and bio-resources that, if destroyed, won't be coming back. Temperatures can stabilize, pollution can go down, but if we can't stave off habitat loss and destruction, we'll be a lot worse off than today. More people means they all need somewhere to live, somewhere to grow their food, and somewhere to put their waste. That space is all at the expense of organisms we need. We can't just shrug our shoulders and assume everything will bounce back eventually.

As for the fertility implosion itself - it needs to happen, sooner or later. Those 20-year olds in the Middle East and the babies being born today? Yeah, they'll get old, too. Brooks' view on demographics is a pyramid scheme, we need to figure it out, and I'd sooner have it happen now while we still have a relative diversity of species and environments left.