jester

Now that I teach high school students how to write webapps with AJAX, I see it wouldn't be possible without firebug.

I cry thinking about the years of web development I have done (and wasted) without firebug.

I agree, this tool is straight from the divine...

The biggest hurdle for using Xerces as a library has been the lack of support for the GNU toolchain during the build process.

As of the 3.0 release, beta due out in weeks, the standard chain of:

* configure
* make
* make install

will be in place.

The user community is helpful and friendly, and the developer community is active and quick to fix bugs.

One drawback is that because of the long gap to introduce the new build process, the developers have been slow to introduce new features.

I was a biology graduate student in 1992 working on the Human Genome project and needing to make different databases talk to each other and needing to munge data files from many formats into new formats - what a nightmare.

Along came Perl, the rest is history.

I left biology, began working in computer science, became an open source developer, and have never looked back.

After 10 years using Perl in systems administration, data visualization, and bioinformatics Perl continues to just Get The Job Done(TM).

However...

In recent years I've been teaching high school students how to program, and after my initial experiences with teaching Perl 5 as their first language, I will not continue. I will either wait for Perl 6, or switch to Ruby or even Python. As a first language, students need predictability and simplicity. Perl 5 offers neither of those.

I still owe many thanks to Larry Wall for writing Perl, Tom Christiansen, and Randall Schwartz for writing the Camel and the Llama, and Tim O'Reilly for creating the O'Reilly books and for writing Unix Power Tools, which is how I first read about Perl.

If you program in *any* scripting language, and your language doesn't have access to some feature - say XML parsing - then SWIG enables you to wrap an existing C/C++ library for XML Parsing as a module for your language.

The documentation is first class.

The developer group is active, helpful and responsive.

The user community is friendly and helpful.

Ubuntu is an amazing step forward in the evolution of Linux.

I began using linux in 1995 with slakware, and it was freedom! But after awhile, shuffling floppy disks became a nightmare, so when I found redhat 3.0.3 in 1996 with a distribution CD and with apackage manager it was a gift from heaven. But I noticed that remotely managing redhat machines was not as nice as I wanted. Then I discovered debian 2.0 in 1998 with the advanced package tool, APT, and I figured I would never leave debian.

For almost 8 years I was a die-hard, but sometimes frustrated, debian supporter. I loved the idea of an open source distribution and the Debian Social Contract, but I wished things would work out-of-the-box more often.

When I met Mark Shuttleworth in a DelhiLUG meeting he completely won me over as an Ubuntu experimenter, and now Ubuntu advocate.

Not only is Ubuntu awesome and the best chance Linux currently has for moving into the mainstream desktop world, the whole concept of Ubuntu making Linux for People is where I want to see the linux movement heading.

I have close to 100 passwords for accounts and websites, and I wouldn't have a chance without revelation.

It has all the features I have ever wanted, and a really well organized user interface.

Thanks for such a helpful tool.

Since I started using firebug, I almost never use the WD toolbar anymore. It was awesome, but it's obsolete now.

I began using XEmacs back when it was still Lucid emacs, and through the years I've been really happy how far ahead XEmacs was compared to GNU Emacs.

Since the 21.4 series, I've been really dissappointed. There are so many things that no longer work out of the box - font-locking, dired mode, manual-mode, etc. I'm really sad that I have chose to install GNU Emacs just to have a working emacs.

'nuf said...