I put the shotgun into an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primer--all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.As much as new and shiny appeals to the magpie that dwells within most programmers/techies I know (myself included), today's exercise was just plain fun. Getting HTML to do what you'd normally expect of blingier platforms like Flash, Silverlight, etc. also forced me to learn a few more things about a language I normally take for granted. Not a bad thing either.
But there were more than a few times when I could as easily have been sitting in front of a TRS-80 or Apple II, tinkering with snippets of code, poking here, prodding there--all to see what would happen. Regardless of how many error messages or unexpected behavior happened, learning occurred more often than not. Learning and the extra reward of coaxing "magic" out of the fractious contraption perched on the table in front of me.
I suppose the explosion of one-off languages and whole platforms is, in this light, a blessing rather than a discouraging thing. No one person will ever be able to grok them all, but the flip side is that tinkerers will never run short of magic.
