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While this is a fine idea, the problem is you still have 8+ hours a day of soul-sucking boring programming on your hands. If you do program for a day job, and your company is resistant to introducing new technology, or writing code that might be more complicated than a 1st year CS student to understand (read: not as easily outsourced); you work at the wrong company for a lot of reasons. Get out, run while you can, save yourself!

If your day job isn't in the soul-sucking range, and is simply not quite as engaging when you were first hired / project first started... try programming in something more conceptual and less familiar. I have spent a lot of years working mainly on buisness apps using traditional object oriented programming languages. (C++ and its children, java and c#) For amusement I started teaching myself functional languages. Haskell, Clojure, and Groovy. With the things I have learned I have even integrated some of what I have learned into my work. Javascript isn't quite as functional a language as the others, but you can do some neat stuff with it. (See Functional Javascript for some really advanced javascript programing.) In a mostly Java shop Groovy fits right in, even easily and directly integrating with existing Java code.

This article has a good discussion on tool mavens vs language mavens. OP is obviously a tool maven. I'm a language maven. I also think that being able to have the typing happen without having to think about it makes coding a lot more natural and enjoyable. But then I use emacs...

Yes, and the most interesting thing about JavaScript is that it is arguably the most successful and widely deployed Lisp ever. Before you laugh, it has procedures as first class objects, can eval code, has lexical closures ... it's an absolutely rocking language if you want to do functional things. I love it for prototyping up algorithms.

Take a look at Functional JavaScript. Extensions for functional programming.

Or the great PrototypeLibrary. Note the functions like 'reduce' that can apply to array.

I don't understand what you're so angry about.

Are you complaining that Laszlo developers should be more secretive about their plans and development process, and not tell anyone what they're doing until the software is fully completed and tested? That's just NOT how an open source project works.

Or are you complaining that we're not working fast enough? Then why don't you lend a hand and contribute some of your own time and effort to the open source project? That IS how an open source project works.

If that's not your problem, then what are you complaining about? Do you have some criticism of the design or implementation? Then speak up while there's still time to influence the development process! If we waited until we were finished before announcing our plans, you wouldn't have a chance to give any feedback, effect the design, or contribute your own efforts.

If you're just one of those people who likes listening to yourself complain about Flash, but doesn't actually feel like contributing to any open source software development efforts, then you might enjoy Oliver Steel's Flash Troll Generator. Oliver wrote the OpenLaszlo compiler, so he knows and hates Flash much more than you could ever aspire to.

-Don

Without.

From a discussion on BayPiggies about MVC:

Someone wrote: "a lot of the related literature seems to use MVC as the canonical example of a design pattern"

MVC is the canonical example of the "Cargo Cult" design pattern of blindly aping Smalltalk without understanding it or considering if there are any more appropriate design patterns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

I've never heard a good explanation of what a "controller" is really supposed to do (other than entangle brittle dependencies between the view and the model, and allow programmers to bill for more hours maintaining the code). But people always throw in that extra "controller" class and its requisite complexity, just because Smalltalk uses them, and it doesn't feel right imitating Smalltalk without the whole MVC trifecta.

Just because MVC is a commonly used and cited "pattern" doesn't mean it's the best one to use in all cases. It's better to have a "purpose" than a "pattern".

http://osteele.com/archives/2003/08/rethinking-mvc

-Don

If all the messages between the model and the view have to go through the controller, then it sounds like a bunch of middleware glue to me. Maybe somebody should write a SWIG-like tool that automatically writes all your controllers for you, since it sounds like a horrible mess to have to write and maintain by hand. I prefer the KISS approach of not using controllers at all. Given any piece of software, there's always going to be a bunch of miscellaneous functionality and glue code that doesn't fit into the nice little boxes envisioned by the designers. With MVC cargo-cult designs, all that miscellaneous stuff gets thrown into the "Controller" class, so it's more appropriately called "Model/View/Etcetera".

MVC was originally designed for Smalltalk, which is a dynamic language with closures, so it just doesn't work as well with static languages like Java (which eventually had to fake closures with inner classes). Java programmers end up abusing controllers to make up for deficiencies in the language that aren't such a big deal in other languages (like dynamically dispatching named events to methods, persistence, scripting, and customizing methods and properties of individual objects, etc). They end up re-inventing little pieces of other languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and Python, and the poor Controller (Etcetera) ends up being where they dump all that glue code that would otherwise be built into the programming language and framework.

-Don

Smalltalk was successful for the same reason the Lisp Machines (including MIT's CADR, Symbolics' Genera, TI's Exploder, Xerox's Interlisp-D) were successful: they had a rich, wonderful, interactive programming environments, which supported exploratory programming, and let you examine, modify and debug the entire state of the system, from the user interface all the way down to the file system and networking. Smalltalk was also successful in that it inspired and influenced a lot of other important languages like Self, which led to the Java hotspot compiler: http://research.sun.com/features/tenyears/volcd/pa pers/ungar.htm

The Eclipse platform was heavily influenced by IBM's extensive work on Smalltalk, and it shows. Sun's doing themselves a lot of self-inflicted damage by boycotting Eclipse, not because it sucks or they have anything that can touch it, but simply because they can't take the joke about its name. (But that's how IBM planned it -- who said a big blue corporation couldn't have a sense of humor?)

More on the "Cargo Cult" design pattern: http://www.softpanorama.org/SE/anti_oo.shtml

-Don

The complexity comes from King Solomon's solution of dissecting the input ha

This reminds me of the page on the many permutations of the spelling of "Aargh."

One thing that screws up web page studies is that some sites duplicate pages hundreds or thousands of times.

Oliver Steele did a cute study on how to spell aargh.

Unfortunately much of his data is screwed up because he counted pages for each spelling not unique pages.

For this study, I don't see this problem ocurring.

One thing I like about Brad Meyers is that he's a strong programmer, as well as an excellent researcher, so he had a first-hand understanding of the real-world issues involved in programming languages and user interface architecture, unlike many academics who talk a lot of theory but never get their hands dirty. Brad Meyers understands where the rubber hits the road, and how important it is to have good tires.

At the time I worked on it, Garnet didn't have pretty graphics like Flash, but the underlying programming system had some advanced features that are sorely lacking from most modern user interface development environments.

Laszlo is an modern open source GUI programming system, with many of Garnet's advanced "natural programming" features like prototypes and constraints. Laszlo currently uses Flash as its virtual machine, but it's a much higher level way to program dynamic interactive web based applications, without using the proprietary Flash authoring tool.

Garnet had a true prototype based OOP system (somewhat like Self), which is great for gui programming, because guis have so many objects that look and behave like each other except for a few little customizations (like the layout, graphical style, data source and call-back behavior).

Garnet also had an automatic constraint system, which enabled you to simply define any attribute as a formula that depend on other attributes, without needing to worry about how and when the values were calculated. Garnet's constraint system automatically figured out the dependences of each formula, and automatically and efficiently recalculated and cached any values that needed to be updated, but only when necessary.

With constraints, you can make a button inside a window, and define its left edge to be ((parent.width - self.width) / 2), and it will automatically remain horizontally centered in the window from then on, without you (the programmer) having to worry about what to do when the parent window's size changes.

Without constraints, you have to manually write all the code that changes the button position whenever the window size changes, which results in code scattered all over the place in different classes and handlers and intermediate objects.

Constraints are much easier to use and more general purpose than resize handlers, springs and struts, complex MVC updating schemes, and other Rube Goldberg devices.

Constraints are especially useful for user interface programming, because they save you from having to write lots of annoying boiler plate and error prone code for handling updates (registering, chasing down dependencies, detecting changes, notifying updates, all happens automatically).

Constraints make GUI programming much easier, but they're also useful anywhere in your program where one value is defined in terms of other values that might change at any time.

Once you've tasted a programming language with constraints, you will not want to go back. Programming without constraints is like writing in machine language: error prone, low level, tedious, inefficient and mind numbing.

Constraints are like structured programming for variables: In the same way that it's better to use loops and conditionals instead of gotos, it's also better to use declarative programming that says what you mean, instead of imperative

One thing I like about Brad Meyers is that he's a strong programmer, as well as an excellent researcher, so he had a first-hand understanding of the real-world issues involved in programming languages and user interface architecture, unlike many academics who talk a lot of theory but never get their hands dirty. Brad Meyers understands where the rubber hits the road, and how important it is to have good tires.

At the time I worked on it, Garnet didn't have pretty graphics like Flash, but the underlying programming system had some advanced features that are sorely lacking from most modern user interface development environments.

Laszlo is an modern open source GUI programming system, with many of Garnet's advanced "natural programming" features like prototypes and constraints. Laszlo currently uses Flash as its virtual machine, but it's a much higher level way to program dynamic interactive web based applications, without using the proprietary Flash authoring tool.

Garnet had a true prototype based OOP system (somewhat like Self), which is great for gui programming, because guis have so many objects that look and behave like each other except for a few little customizations (like the layout, graphical style, data source and call-back behavior).

Garnet also had an automatic constraint system, which enabled you to simply define any attribute as a formula that depend on other attributes, without needing to worry about how and when the values were calculated. Garnet's constraint system automatically figured out the dependences of each formula, and automatically and efficiently recalculated and cached any values that needed to be updated, but only when necessary.

With constraints, you can make a button inside a window, and define its left edge to be ((parent.width - self.width) / 2), and it will automatically remain horizontally centered in the window from then on, without you (the programmer) having to worry about what to do when the parent window's size changes.

Without constraints, you have to manually write all the code that changes the button position whenever the window size changes, which results in code scattered all over the place in different classes and handlers and intermediate objects.

Constraints are much easier to use and more general purpose than resize handlers, springs and struts, complex MVC updating schemes, and other Rube Goldberg devices.

Constraints are especially useful for user interface programming, because they save you from having to write lots of annoying boiler plate and error prone code for handling updates (registering, chasing down dependencies, detecting changes, notifying updates, all happens automatically).

Constraints make GUI programming much easier, but they're also useful anywhere in your program where one value is defined in terms of other values that might change at any time.

Once you've tasted a programming language with constraints, you will not want to go back. Programming without constraints is like writing in machine language: error prone, low level, tedious, inefficient and mind numbing.

Constraints are like structured programming for variables: In the same way that it's better to use loops and conditionals instead of gotos, it's also better to use declarative programming that says what you mean, instead of imperative

One thing I like about Brad Meyers is that he's a strong programmer, as well as an excellent researcher, so he had a first-hand understanding of the real-world issues involved in programming languages and user interface architecture, unlike many academics who talk a lot of theory but never get their hands dirty. Brad Meyers understands where the rubber hits the road, and how important it is to have good tires.

At the time I worked on it, Garnet didn't have pretty graphics like Flash, but the underlying programming system had some advanced features that are sorely lacking from most modern user interface development environments.

Laszlo is an modern open source GUI programming system, with many of Garnet's advanced "natural programming" features like prototypes and constraints. Laszlo currently uses Flash as its virtual machine, but it's a much higher level way to program dynamic interactive web based applications, without using the proprietary Flash authoring tool.

Garnet had a true prototype based OOP system (somewhat like Self), which is great for gui programming, because guis have so many objects that look and behave like each other except for a few little customizations (like the layout, graphical style, data source and call-back behavior).

Garnet also had an automatic constraint system, which enabled you to simply define any attribute as a formula that depend on other attributes, without needing to worry about how and when the values were calculated. Garnet's constraint system automatically figured out the dependences of each formula, and automatically and efficiently recalculated and cached any values that needed to be updated, but only when necessary.

With constraints, you can make a button inside a window, and define its left edge to be ((parent.width - self.width) / 2), and it will automatically remain horizontally centered in the window from then on, without you (the programmer) having to worry about what to do when the parent window's size changes.

Without constraints, you have to manually write all the code that changes the button position whenever the window size changes, which results in code scattered all over the place in different classes and handlers and intermediate objects.

Constraints are much easier to use and more general purpose than resize handlers, springs and struts, complex MVC updating schemes, and other Rube Goldberg devices.

Constraints are especially useful for user interface programming, because they save you from having to write lots of annoying boiler plate and error prone code for handling updates (registering, chasing down dependencies, detecting changes, notifying updates, all happens automatically).

Constraints make GUI programming much easier, but they're also useful anywhere in your program where one value is defined in terms of other values that might change at any time.

Once you've tasted a programming language with constraints, you will not want to go back. Programming without constraints is like writing in machine language: error prone, low level, tedious, inefficient and mind numbing.

Constraints are like structured programming for variables: In the same way that it's better to use loops and conditionals instead of gotos, it's also better to use declarative programming that says what you mean, instead of imperative