I wasn't going to say anything about the Ajax Experience conference, and the fact that there was no women as presenters. I would think this would be painfully embarrassing to the Ajax Experience organizers, but they've never seemed overly concerned about the homogeneous nature of the conference.
However, when I read a review of the Kevin Lynch keynote where the reviewer references the "guy features" of Tamarin (the scripting engine Adobe has donated to Firefox), I must admit to a small jaw dropping moment. Especially when you look at the writing in context:
Next, Kevin chatted about the Tamarin project, reviewing the guy features and described it as “JavaScript from the future”, reviewing key features, such as:
- Much faster performance
- E4X
- Strong types
- Sealed classes
- Runtime exceptions
- (Highly optimized, fast) regular expressions
Much 'faster' performance…runtime exceptions…strong types…oh my. Various images ran through my mind reading this, most of which I can't repeat in polite company.
All teasing aside, I'm not sure that I would want to pin all my hopes for the future generations of applications on Google Gears and Adobe AIR. I went through this in the 1990's when we were encouraged to tie into Microsoft and IE when it came to that generation of application. Except in those days time, the emphasis was on moving away from the desktop — that old nasty, dusty desktop — and toward web-based applications, only.
In my comments to the last post, Brendan Eich mentioned how the decision to spawn off Thunderbird had nothing to do with Google, and I believe him and never thought it did, myself. I am concerned, though, about a growing tie-in between Adobe and Mozilla. Yes it was 'nice' of Adobe to open source Tamarin and donate this scripting engine to Mozilla. I'm just wary of Geeks bearing gifts.
