Philosophy of Web services.
Had a very interesting meeting yesterday, for some reason I'm not allowed to say who it was. So I'll characterize the person instead of naming him. He is an advocate of a particular scripting language, on that's got a loyal following, but it's not one of the huge languages, like Perl or Java; but it's not small either. We were talking about the Seybold keynote on web services. I've got my cast pretty well set, but I was interested in having this person demo some kind of SOAP or XML-RPC app with his scripting language. No matter how we approached it, he was always trying to sell his scripting language, which of course is okay, but later this struck me as totally at odds with the philosophy of web services. I was reminded that when I was in manifesto mode for this stuff, that's exactly what I was saying. And when I meet users of this stuff that's what they value the most, no lock-in, ease of movement and migration of code. The only ones who don't see it this way are the big companies and their followers who snicker about choice issues, and assume everyone wants to use the environment they use or will want to once they are assimilated. Emphatically, these people are not using the Web, and they might as well use their own language's native mechanism for cross-network communication, they gain nothing by using a protocol that's supported in lots of languages and environments. Yes, I am naive, and I choose to be that way. I understand that sometimes people pretend to support choice, when they really just want to confuse people, or keep them arguing about small details while they take over the world, but I hold them to a higher standard. Let's dispense, once and for all, of these monsters. If you can't handle competition, get out of the kitchen. You know what I mean. [Scripting News]
3:31:25 PM 
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