It's always nice to be reminded that Justice Gray doesn't just influence individual developers, but in fact also determines the direction of major corporations. That's the other big message - aside from the one in the post title - that Microsoft has given the industry, by showing everyone that Office 2010 has been written entirely in Javascript! That is right, Silverlight now joins the ranks of other hallowed languages/applications like J# and Visual Sourcesafe in the realm of "things that Microsoft produces but has no intention of ever actually using themselves". Let's think about that for a second:
if you are developing with Silverlight, you are using the development equivalent of Visual Sourcesafe, only with a marginally better ability to show demos of animated spinning balls!!
Looking at this from a longer-term perspective it's obvious this was always bound to happen:
1) Microsoft does a bunch of public demos about "Silverlight is the greatest thing ever because who really likes to learn about a key language of the development area you're working in! I *hate* pesky learning!"
2) Justice Gray attends said public demo and posts an impassioned defense where he reveals Javascript is the greatest development language ever, aside from the unfortunately unreleased Justic#
3) Microsoft's Scott Guthrie has a heart to heart with the framed picture of Justice Gray on his wall
4) The ASP.NET MVC team reveals they are bundling in JQuery
5) Microsoft reveals Office 2010 is all Javascript all the time
Can a public Silverlight book burning at the next major industry conference be all that far behind?
I'm sure some of you feel that I am being unkind to poor, downtrodden Silverlight. To be fair, I am sure that maybe there is a large market for apps that rotate an image of a swan multiple times!!!
Sorry, I guess once again my ace hacking abilities have destroyed an entire industry vertical.
Look, we're all friends here, and because no one is your best friend like Justice Gray, I am imploring all of you who are "developing" or whatever you call what you do in Sliverlight...just come back to do real man's web development before you're unemployable!!! It's not too late!
Subscribe