Joel on Ajax
October 11 2007 by 
Adam
I am pretty late to the game on this one – I have nearly 500 unread posts in my RSS aggregator in my "ColdFusion & Tech" folder alone! But I thought it would be pertinent to mention Joel's recent post, Strategy Letter VI. Whether you agree or disagree, he raises an excellent point for discussion — much like one of my favorite TV shows: Penn & Teller: BS.
Joel thinks that developers should focus on features, and let the efficiency catch up later:
The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that?s portable and efficient. It should compile down to ?native? code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don?t have to.There is some controversy on the article, and I'm a little surprised at how little attention it's gotten. It was only dugg a handfull of times, it only returns 280-something results in a Technorati Search, and even gets some staunch criticism on his own section of Reddit. I also happened to read the critique at Ajaxian – with more valid points and a pretty decent discussion going on in the comments. It will be interesting to see how things pan out. Personally I think it will be somewhere in the middle. Maybe Google will be the ones to develop the NewSDK that Joel goes on about. Or they buy it. ;)
Posted in AJAX | 