Javascript is the new BASIC. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I think I come from the last generation of programmers that grew up learning a BASIC dialect as our first programming language. Then came Java, then Python, then C#, and now Javascript.

I grew up with Qbasic 1.1 on MS-Dos 5, chugging along on my dad's old 386sx. We didn't even have a floating point co-processor. But coding on that thing was so much fun. I made my own sprite editor, a hand full of games, and got it to do some of my math home work for me. I can even go back today, and with a little bit of reflection, do some wizardry again in that ancient old programming language. Probably the best part about programming in QBasic was that a good chunk of this was before the internet. I actually had to go to the library and check out an ancient programming manual, then figure out how to adapt it to QBasic. This was fun.

So now here I am, 20 years later. (Have I really been doing this for 20 years?) I develop .NET all day working on a CRM system. Programming hasn't really been much fun. It's been quite productive, that's for sure, but not much fun. Then I decided to put together my Romflow application. This isn't the first time I've tried to make an emulation frontend, but this is probably my best effort to date. In looking at the other options available, I wanted to make something fast, something customizable, and something easy. So instead of doing a plugin system using C# interfaces, or hardcoding something using System.Drawing, I decided to look into using a web control hosted application. And you know what? It works really really well.

Kind of. You see, I'm not very good with the HTMLs and the CSS and the Javascript. Since I graduated from QBasic, I've stuck exclusively with statically typed languages. I liked the predictability and stability, and the ease of debugging that statically typed languages had to offer. However, at least not right away, this is not really an option for working with romflow. While it's possible to design a silverlight application, or a flash application, or a dart application, it's actually just much simpler to write something in Javascript.

Even though it's simpler, it's still not all that simple. You have to remember, we are doing things to HTML that it was never intended to be doing. HTML was meant to be a document, not an application framework. Never the less though, here we are. The biggest challenge for me is working with CSS though, not even Javascript. CSS feels like the rules are made up as you go along. Especially when it comes to vertically aligning content.

Despite having stack exchange, countless forums, and numerous other resources, making a good looking web app is still a gigantic challenge. Especially if you are invoking the dreaded window.external API. But, when I actually got something working the way I wanted it to work, I was 8 again, hacking away on my dad's dying PC. Hours started to go by as every minute, my app worked a little better, and a little better still. I no longer see an empty HTML page as a portal to evil, but rather as a canvas to paint my ideas upon. Javascript is fun. And fun isn't something I've had with programming for quite a while. It's challenging as well.

Blogging is hard and stuff.

Blogging is hard. I'm still not even sure why I really try, but it really is damn hard for me to not want to obliterate my blog every few months, make a new one, then delete that one again after only making a post or two. So now I'm making it my mission to try and update at least once a week, whether I have something to write or not.

So, what have I been up to lately?

I'm trying to get myself off of Windows. Not that there is anything wrong with windows, it's just that Linux is a lot more fun. Now that steam is a viable product, and now a certain horrible hardware company's drivers are usable, there is nothing that I can do on my laptop under Linux, that I can't do under windows.

I'm also trying to teach myself Python as well. Python is a great language that gets a lot of flack for being slow. I don't care how fast it is as long as it's fast enough. For everything short of AAA game development, it's more than plenty fast.

During the day, I write C# code. All day long, it's C#, and Winforms, and SQL, and so on. I feel there is a certain advantage in separating one's work experience from their home experience. This is hard because I actually enjoy coding in C# a great deal.

But there is this certain grand elegance when coding with python. Style is something setup for you using PEP-8. There is a python library for nearly everything, and it excels on low end hardware like the raspberry pi. What really spurred me on to learn it was pycharm having a free community edition.

Still not exactly sure what I want to do with python yet, but I will post if I come up with something cool. Maybe a port or an adaption of romflow?

Romulator Lightboxing

Lightboxing. It will look better when the theme is up and running.

Romulator Update

Got quicksave, quickload and quit working. Send message is a downright pain.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.sendkeys.aspx

Instead of deleting all the posts and starting a new blog from scratch again...

I'm just going to keep updating this one!

Right now I'm working on a emulator front-end using HTML5 as the theeming engine. Works a lot better than I thought. Right now the large part of the work remaining is coming up with a killer theme that plays nice with the game-pad interface I've set up. At some point, I should diagram all this out.

So I kind of have a dynamic code generation...

So I kind of have a dynamic code generation and execution library written in C# that works on Linux now, if you have GCC installed. It works, as long as you define your delegate ahead of time, and pass it in as part of the process. But what if you don't know what you want ahead of time? Say you want to ask the user, how many parameters do you want to pass to the function? Right now you can't generate dynamically your calls, it won't let you cheat, but I think I figured a way around this. And that is... Using the CodeDOM The CodeDOM provides types that represent many common types of source code elements. You can design a program that builds a source code model using CodeDOM elements to assemble an object graph. This o... View or comment on Joel Longanecker's post » Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. Learn more. Join Google+

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