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

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.