Get Your Moto On

corz writes "Has PHP got you down? Are you tired of writing those Perl CGI scripts? Why not check out The Moto Programming Language. Released under the GPL, Moto allows for two modes of execution: interpreted and compiled. Moto is different from the rest of the field in that you can develop a site using interpreted mode for quick testing, then when the site is ready for production you can compile the it into an Apache DSO and serve it straight from memory. If you are looking to learn a new language, or would like to help with development, consider giving Moto a chance. Go download it now."

Comments

Not another language...

[lightspawn]

If this functionality really doesn't exist in Python/Perl/whatever, I wish "they"'d start working on it instead of inventing a completely new language to learn, which is probably not as good as what's already out there.

If it does - I'm sure somebody will point out how to do this with their pet language.

YAHPP?

[NetRanger]

Yet Another HTML Pre-Processor.

If HTML needs so much pre-processing, perhaps it is time to standardize a new HTML, instead of writing all these incompatible pre-processors for it.

Of course, that's just my humble opinion...

Embedded languages - pah

[Professor Collins]

I'm sad to see the curse of ASP and its copycats continue on like this. Embedding script inside a document file makes it quick and easy for non-programmers to write messy, unmaintainable code:

• They violate Model-View-Controller (MVC) separation. While it is possible to write your controller code as one long block of PHP and call its functions from your view scripts, that totally obviates the purported advantages of an embedded language.
• The embedded languages themselves are generally horrible. Visual Basic needs no run-down of its deficiencies. PHP is an overgrown SSI replacement which has ended up looking like a bad parody of Perl. Moto looks to be little more than a light wrapper around C. None of these languages have a proper object model, consistent database integration, or a good extension mechanism.
• They slow down maintenance of code. While the initial development phase may be expediated by the ability to embed code inside HTML, the web of markup and programme logic quickly becomes entangled in itself, and only gets worse over time. Starting with a proper top-down design phase may slow down development at first, but will be greatly rewarding in the long run.

The idea of Moto as both a compiled and interpreted language is noble (although not original; most Common LISP and Smalltalk implementations have both interpreted and compiled environments), but I urge them to reconsider their misguided language design strategy. They don't even need to come up with their own language; building a native code compiler for an established language like Python or Ruby would be a much greater boon to the open-source community at large.

Re:Embedded languages - pah

[motojoe]

The fact of the matter is if you look at CGIs in the days when they had to be written in C you'll find that 90% of the code was for interface generation. A ton of printfs and a little bit of logic. That's not the balance most programs should have. Add to this the process most consulting firms go through when creating web based applications is to have the designers create HTML 'comps' first which then get sent to engineers to be made 'dynamic'. Often time the design will go through many subsequent revisions after coding has begun. The value of having code embedded into HTML so that the same pages can by modified by either the engineer or the designer should be clear. This is not to say that large blocks of non-interface related code shouldn't be coded in a language like C or C++. They should. But often times disentangling logic from interface is simply not possible or valuable. -Dave

Re:Embedded languages - pah

[WasterDave]

OMFG, someone who knows about software design posting to slashdot. Where are my mod points when I need them?

Dave

Re:Perl & mod_perl

[Sentry21]

This is somewhat analogous to using Perl and mod_perl. If that's the only reason to use Moto, I'd stick with Perl instead.

I think you misunderstand what's happening here.

In 'fast mode', you're using it like mod_perl or PHP, but the next step is to compile it to native code and run it as a binary server module - not interpreted by, but run as. With mod_perl or php, your site is always interpreted by the DSO, but for Moto, your site IS the DSO. This provides a nice speed boost.

--Dan