September 28th, 2005
Have you ever noticed that standing in line for a long time is a lot like going to school? Remember when you went to school as a kid, you saw all these people who were older than you, you never knew them, never spoke to them, but you knew who they were. Because the younger ones always look up to the older ones. You would see them on the bus or in the supermarket and you would know they went to your school. On the contrary, they didn't care about you. So you got a little older and suddenly you were the age they were back then. And you see all these younger kids around the school, but you never pay much attention to them, do you? When you were their age, you knew the older ones, but now you don't bother with the younger kids.
It's like that with standing in line for something. You notice the people in front of you (granted, not surprisingly, given that you are oriented toward them) and you wish you could be where they are. But you don't care to see the people behind you, do you? What the hell for?
That's cause the people behind us (at school too, that's right) are even worse off. It's all about progress. That's why I can't stand the people with higher marks like me at university but I don't care about those who are worse :D
[...] A while back I was praising ant for being an improvement over make. And it is, it’s smoother, it’s nicer, it’s more suited to the needs we have from a build tool today, make is ancient afterall. But then ant has it’s problems.. the xml configuration scripts are a bit cumbersome and unnecessarily complicated (I mean who actually enjoys writing xml?) aaaand it’s java based. Nice for portability, bad for speed. If you’re building eclipse and you set up ant to do it, big deal, it takes forever anyway, the overhead in a java build tool won’t bother you. But if you have a dozen java source files and you’re working on some small project, you could still use a build tool to keep building more streamlined and organized, but ant won’t feel like such a great choice anymore. Because making one small change in a source file will launch ant to rebuild that class. And even though compiling java doesn’t take that long, launching ant itself probably takes longer. So there’s a tangible overhead. Launching the vm itself takes a little while. [...]