It is amazing how fast JavaScript is coming on. The word from Microsoft used to be C#.NET and VB.NET, with an occasional nod to C++. Now JavaScript is getting equal time as a first tier tool.

It's a little weird to me because JS flies in the face of many modern software directions, object orientation to name one. But I am definitely paying attention.

I am surprised that you give the back of your hand to mobile. To me it seems entirely where things are going.

Don't get me started, though, on one interface to rule them all ;-) A desktop monitor is an entirely different beast from a smartphone.

>John,
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>I agree... I'm not running anywhere near the bleeding edge today. I've pulled way back and am happy using the tools I've been using for the last 5 years today.
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>The only place where I still bleed is with JavaScript, because the pace there is so frantic and it's a good idea to try and at least get an understanding of where things are headed. I'm not liking where we're going with this at the moment, but it's interesting to follow nevertheless.
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>Mobile is overrated IMHO. It's important for some things (especially the consumer space) but not nearly as important as made out to be. Plus there's no money in it except for consultants - certainly not for companies. I expect this place to calm down and come to its senses and fall back onto some sorts of standards based mechanism that will work across platforms. HTML most likely... more and more is already pointing in that direction and I'm sure that's where we're going. Specialized hardware specific software is not long for this world :-) Just like Microsoft who bet big on this years ago (with WPF, then Silverlight) other vendors will fail here and eventually fall to open standards.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>>>I've said it before and I say it again. If you are at the top of your technology and you've put in your time, the amount of code you write between different tools/technologies will not vary drastically. The code I wrote with FoxPro on typical business systems at the end of that cycle, didn't look that drastically different than the .NET code I write today for business systems. Similar logic through similar business process/framework logic looks similar no matter which approach you take!
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>>That may be true for many needs if you have a commercial or personal framework encapsulating much of the unwieldy stuff. I assume that's your point. But what about native mobile apps which are the new frontier? We're back to pre-Windows3.0 days waiting for Ashton Tate. Current expectation is that whatever wins the mobile battle will determine what happens on desktop too.
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>>As for servers: depends who wins the battle between the Pricelines and eBays versus the Googles and Microsofts. The first group is committed to local apps; the other wants to rule servers up in the clouds where it all happens. While people are more than capable of putting their heads into the server noose, I vote for the Pricelines and Amazons for a simple reason: they own the customer relationship that matters, where the finger hits the touchscreen.
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>>So IMHO local mobile apps will win and servers increasingly will be repositories. With the current state of mobile development, I agree with Tuvia that it's a mess. But it has been for a while all across IT and the very best practitioners IMHO are the ones who stay calm/minimize change while all around them are frantically learning Visual Flavor of the Hour or rewriting stuff to keep the deck chairs nicely arranged on the Titanic. This process of being alert and ready but not going with the flow was called "masterly inactivity" in a famous medical book called House of God (in which some patients got sicker the more you did for them.) That book also advocated a simple rule: in a crisis, the first thing to do is take your own pulse. ;-)