Crunchy Frog

I was musing over the usual eloquence of Mr. Hague's recent post Stumbling Into the Cold Expanse of Real Programming, when the following logical progression occurred to me. Very few of us intend to ship Spring Surprise out into the real world, rather we more often find ourselves in the quagmire that is the collision between what we knew 10 minutes ago and what we now know.

It is one thing to awake into reality from writing ASP.NET web applications, realizing that the client is far better suited to managing the life cycle of the page and, by George!, JavaScript is the language to do it--a class of the series of infinite dawnings upon which await us as developers (to which Mr. Hague aludes). 

It is quite another to realize that there are giant, man-eating spiders inside the languages and frameworks you have adopted and embraced for the last few months or years. From that, it is another thing entirely to know whether these venom dripping, tentacled creatures of nightmare pose any real risk to your application or users. 

Our future selves, 10 minutes from now, will know whether to fog the house, burn it all to the ground, or simply ignore them and move on. For now, it is probably best to walk slowly and carry sharp pointy things (but not too sharp, the walls could be made of people).