At GUADEC I saw James Henstridge talking about PyORBit, Marc Mulcahy talking about speech services, Michael Meeks talking about CORBA/Bonobo IPC and Miguel de Icaza talking about GTK#.
Overall it made me feel like I've been living in the dark ages of programming. Particularly, Miguel's presentation. I assumed that by the time they got mono to work nobody would care anymore; that Microsoft would have moved the goal posts or changed the game. But there it was in living code. C# driving GTK. It looked great. I wanted to sign up straight away.
And while I was listening to the PyORBit presentation I was thinking that I could port it to Perl. But I probably won't and neither will anyone else unless they do it out of perversity.
Perl addresses a different problem space. And there it rules supreme. But there is another world out there and in the end I wonder if we aren't just squabbling in the dirt.
In the end I felt a little sad:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
Not to mention the Camel being "galled, sore-footed, refractory".
