TG: Programming: The Continuing Silverboat Saga

Home - Programming - The Continuing Silverboat Saga

Silverboat is nearly ready, but not ready enough, so I'm going to miss showing it at NRF this year. The front end is coming along rapidly using React, although not has quickly as I'd like because React, like all Javascript frameworks, is burdened with a certain amount of suck. It's like the college kids doing their theses out of which these frameworks tumble half-baked and not ready for enterprise development, in an attempt to come up with something edgy and disruptive, can't also come up with a new programming paradigm that "just works".

The best thing that ever happened to Javascript is Typescript. I said what I said.

Javascript's problem is it's a scripting language, with all the shortcuts that scripting languages take while implementing the at-first only semi-intuitive, single-threaded, functional programming approach, and while it's possible to do some amazing stuff with it, most frameworks fail to properly pull in mainstream programming methodologies without also making an already slippery programming experience a thousand times more hairy and unstable.

As the master said to the acolyte, I don't want to have to learn another editor ("The Tao of Programming"), or in this case another framework. And each framework is still so under-cooked that they require at least one breaking update a year, making it a moving target. I don't want to spend my time having to relearn your stupid tool, dummy. If you can't plan ahead well enough to produce something that lasts more than a couple of years, stop trying. You're just hurting other developers.

Okay, enough of that.

I've updated the back end to allow referencing child collections through parent attributes, and I'm building an editor to make constructing the new parts of the data dictionary a bit easier. Once that's done I can continue with building out the UI for customers, sales, and inventory.

Next up after that is a number of integrations to third part platforms that I've partnered with in the past.

Next year's NRF is going to be amazing!