Water, a Newish Web Language Out of MIT

jimdesu writes "True to its religion, MIT has reinvented LISP again, this time as a web-programming language called Water.At first blush, it looks rather interesting. It supports hashes, vectors and objects (prototype based) in a manner that makes it look as much like XML as one could possibly conceive. I'm certainly going to play with it. Anyway, the url is at http://www.waterlang.org."

Comments

Re:Interesting.. but.

[Zach Garner]

How MUCH crack have you been smoking?

LISP is over-rated but XML is just fine?

Go Read

Re:VB

[wcbarksdale]

Why? Understanding Scheme is much simpler than understanding Visual Basic. People who really understand a language could write it from scratch if they had to.

Interesting combinations of programming languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Water + PROLOG = Waterlog
Water + Java = Kaffe

Would a very large program written in Water be called Sea? Get it? Sea? C?

Talk about diving into some Water programming. If you are under a lot of water programming, would you be drowning with work?

Gator based on Ada and Water = Gatorada

I'll shut up now.

Here is Oleg's take on it

[PissingInTheWind]

From: http://pobox.com/~oleg/ftp/papers/ILC02-impression s.txt

* Sharpening the parentheses: bringing Lisp ideas to programming the Web

Henry Lieberman of MIT Multimedia Lab.

Henry Lieberman said that Lisp is indeed good for web
programming, but people seem to prefer sharp parentheses () to round
ones. If you can use Lisp, you should -- he said, -- but sometimes,
you're constrained: you have to accept legacy XML documents and XSLT
stylesheets. His solution: design a programming language with an XML
syntax. He went on to describe a programming language,
. As it turns out, XML syntax is indeed
unsuitable for a programming language. So, the Language 'Water' uses
some kind of a simplified XML syntax. The language is not Lisp either
-- neither in notation (which is infix), nor in semantics. It looks a
lot like a Javascript. Programs in the Water language can run either
on a server, or on the client, in a browser plug-in.

This talk left several people puzzled: at first the author
said he wanted to use XML because it's popular, and Lisp because it's
a good language. He ended up using neither. BTW, Water requires a
license for a commercial use. I drew two conclusions: first, we need
to advertise SXML better. SXML can do everything Water does -- and can
do more and better. I also need to look up Henry Lieberman's slides,
which say "Web community blew the web programming" and "web
programming collapses under its own weight." Imagine a slide: Henry
Lieberman, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee, says: "Web programming is
collapsing under its own weight." We need to save it.

I wanted to talk with Henry Lieberman and point out that there
is another way to assure interoperability with the XML culture. Rather
than translating Lisp to XML, we can translate XML and XML tools into
Lisp. That's what the SXML talk was all about. I didn't catch him. The
conference schedule didn't leave much time for discussions. Anyway,
SXML ideas are timely, we are not doing worse than other people -- and
perhaps better.

My overall impression from that talk is disappointment: I
thought people at MIT media lab can design better languages than I do.

Highly Biased Examples?

[Unknown Relic]

Is it just me, or is the Water vs JSP example highly biased? I mean I'm as interested as anybody else about a new programming language, but the use of such an example really made me question if finding out more was worth my time.

For those of you who didn't read the document, "The task is to create a new HTML tag with a single parameter, message, and use the tag from an HTML page to insert the chunk of HTML"

Essentially what they want to do is define a new html tag and have it spit out a message. Not surprisingly, this is exactly how water seems to worry. According to their findings, this task can be completed in a single 7 line file in water, while using JSP it requires 4 files, 65 lines of code and 4 languages! While I'm not experienced with JSP, from looking at the code not only do they seem to be using a hugely complex solution for a simple problem, but a lot of unnecessary code as well. This doesn't even take into account the fact that they are counting blank lines as lines of code, and are putting every single opening and closing curly bracket on iits own line!

I can't speak for the rest of you, but I would be much more interested in seeing some comparative examples which try to solve a problem in the manner best suited to each language. This nonsense of implementing a single highly specific and language biased solution to a very simple task just doesn't cut it.

Re:Highly Biased Examples?

[aminorex]

I have to agree with you.

My impression is that the Water vs. JSP example
is a poor one because JSP is designed for a
different scale of complexity and level of control.
The overhead for JSP programming is quite large,
but as a result of buying into it's infrastructure,
you get a lot of library support. That makes it
suitable for large-scale development, where functional
components need to be finely factored and real-world
issues like deployment methods and human resource
application come into play. It's also a poor
example for showing the benefits of Water (of which
I admit ignorance) because it makes Water look
like a toy.

Think about a Hello, World program.

Basic:
Print "Hello, World!"

C:
#include
int main (int * ac, char ** av) {
printf("Hello, World!\n");
}

Java:
import java.lang.*;
package org.slashdot.examples;
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
System.exit(0);
}
}

Each of these is increasingly verbose and complex,
yet who would argue that it was more complicated
and difficult to develop and maintain a typical
3-tier application in Java than in Basic?

Of course the cost of entry is not a definitive
indicator of the leverage offered by a platform!
(format t "Hello, World!%n")
is pretty straightforward, but CommonLISP is a
very sophisticated and highly leveragable
environment. It may well be that Water has
inherited a similar scalability, but the example
fails to show this, by virtue of its triviality.

XML syntax?

[Kopretinka]

I wonder - have the authors of Water ever seen XML? What they have does in fact use pointy brackets, but that's about it. Consider for yourselves:

true.<and false/>
<thing foo=5/>.<equal <thing foo=5/> />
object.<get key lookup=false if_missing='return' default=false/>

I've seen a language that works with XML as a first-class data structure, but it had a normal C-like syntax, say

x = <foo bar="3"/>;
if (x.bar == 3) {...};

IMHO the latter makes much more sense - you can work with XML and you don't have to learn a whole new LISPy hybrid syntax.

Re:Here is Oleg's take on it + Troll

[foniksonik]

"you have to accept legacy XML documents and XSLT
stylesheets"

When did XML become a 'legacy' language?

Wow, the 2nd millenium sure is moving fast!