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Google Engineer: We Need More Web Programming Languages
itwbennett (1594911) writes Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function and usability — if developers have more programming languages to choose from, according to a Google engineer. 'The Web is always available, except when it is not,' said Gilad Bracha, software engineer at Google and one of the authors of Google Dart, speaking to an audience of programmers Wednesday at the QCon developer conference in New York. 'It isn't always available in a way that you can always rely on it. You may have a network that is slow or flaky or someone may want to charge you.' Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said. The Web programming language of the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.
any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use
So what's the point of this being a "Web" language? Why not just keep downloading apps like we always have?
Please no, no more web languages!
There are far too many choices now. Most of them only differ in minor semantics, but it is enough that it makes porting already well-designed code a pain. It also muddles education and opens opportunities for countless security holes through exploits.
What we need is a "golden ideal" language - which may not be possible, but if we could whittle it down to three or four special purpose languages, optimized for specific uses, and a solid general-purpose language, we'd have an ecosystem worth contributing to and using.
"Web programming language is a buzzword that I heard before since 1994-1995 over and over and over and over and over again. Here is one joke about one of the "Web programming languages" from that era:
--Knock knock!
--Who is there?
--... (wait one minute before replying... And then:) Java!
But for some reason, every declared "web programming language" seem to not having universal adoption.
Question is: Why, and why are they talking about it again and again?
Translation: Google is about to introduce yet another web language into this Tower of Babel
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Is to ditch the idiotic idea of trying to bolt a scripting language onto a layout language to build interactive applications.
Why not let the web do what the web is good at and regular desktop environments do what they're good at? What's funny to me is how what these "web engineers" seem to be describing is Java, so why not just implement a browser in Java that can run Java-web-app code for its page/interface functionality? Java has the notion of security built into its core, so as long as you set that up properly, you should be able to safely and securely sandbox web-downloaded code, right?
Anyone who thinks there aren't enough languages shouldn't be shot on sight. No exceptions.
What we need are people who are more interested in developing quality software, which works, without thinking they need to be on the bleeding edge of technology. Look at how horrible the web has become because people thought they were being hip and edgy by making continuous scrolling web sites or slide out menu options.
If you make a robust site, or application, you won't need to worry about needing the latest and greatest because it will just work.
Further, trying to claim that desktop applications are usable is a joke in itself. Just like web sites, developers, and the companies they work for, think throwing eye candy at the user is what is needed. As a result, one is constantly fighting the application because it thinks it knows what you are trying to do and tries to be "helpful" when all it's doing is getting in the way. Automatic tabs in Word anyone?
This is just another example of people in the industry being out of touch with reality. Maybe if they would spend more time out of their cube watching how real people perform their work,and how today's systems perform, we wouldn't have to hear about this nonsense every other week.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
So, uh, localstorage? Yeah, that thing is marvellous.
The problem with localStorage is the key:pair nonsense method of storing.
If you want to store anything else, you will need to convert it to store it in there, be it base64ing, JSONing or whatever else-ing.
There is also the offline stuff that doesn't seem to be getting any love either.
I remember GOOGLE (who'da thunk it) made gears to test out offline mode and localstorage with Gears, then dropped it, then offline mode sorta.. vanished.
Now the only way to do it is install a damn extension. Seriously? Why is that?
The problem is App Cache is awful as hell to work with. (even worse because it requires messing around with yet another MIME type. STOP that already, fuck)
What needs to be done is JAVASCRIPT needs to be standardized in regards to dealing with data regardless of it being on or offline.
There should be a system of accessing data, which will check if there is an internet connection (which will be held in a variable that you define via an active connection, which will fail after a period if it can't get any reply, like always), if it can't access that connection, it will check the local storage.
The manifest crap should be ditched and replaced with something far more streamlined.
JS is already there, it is just awful to work with because it has just been piled on top without any reasonable thought to the use-cases defined in them, which is pretty stupid.
The entire local storage spec needs revisin'. That is everything, app caches, session, local and every other storage method. It is an inconsistent mess. AGAIN.
The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
I keep hearing about a shortage of software developers. Why don't we go back to industry standards, so that skills are portable?
Each corporate walled garden has its own languages, frameworks, and development tools. This causes programmers to become uber-specialists, not only learning a walled garden, but learning each corporation's churn of random change. (Microsoft: Forget Visual Basic, we've got C#! Forget ADO.NET, we've got EF! Apple: Forget Objective-C, we've got Swift! Google: Forget that Android API from two point releases ago, we've got a new one!) Your skills aren't portable from one walled garden to another, and not even from one year to another in your own walled garden.
I do give Google credit for using Java in Android, but not because they wanted an industry-standard language other people use, but because it was free.
But each corporation has its own sandbox for developers:
- Apple has Objective-C (and Swift), iOS, Core Date, etc.
- Google has Java, Android, their own database API, etc.
- Microsoft has Windows/Metro/etc, C#, EF, etc.
If I know one of these sandboxes, I couldn't get a job in another sandbox, even though it's all the same stuff with different names.
So if there's a developer shortage, why not stop having so many languages and return to portable skills?
Another way to mine your privacy and sell it?
We don't need more web programming languages. Just one good one.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Of course we had Java applets for that.
Then standalone flash-apps
and then AIR.
Somewhere inbetween the web-app and the local app we had the dreaded ActiveX.
And didn't both Firefox and chrome offer, but fail to establish some container format to add mostly local HTML&Javascript archives to the start menu and work similar to local apps?
HTML5 at least put a standard onto local storage.
And I'm completly leaving out Silverlight-Apps as I can't exactly remember their intended purpose. (But I'm pretty sure it was something along the lines of uniting local and web apps, too)
Did I miss out something?
bickerdyke
Languages we have. Add on emscripten (a back end for LLVM) we have a healthy number of language. But do we have a framework for these to live in which can allow apps to expand out of the browser? And are the frameworks designed for anything other than the Java script world the browsers live in.
> Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function
An app built on top of a app on top of a framework will not surpass an app build directly on the framework in function. It may be easier to develop, but that is a different thing.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
So how about that? A programming language that'll download and store a program for later use just in case the network connection isn't stable or available. Sounds good to me. Having more than one way to get a program is a great thing to do.
Seems to me that if I can't rely on my network I'd want some sort of storage media that'll let me back up or reinstall the base program. It should also be light and easy to transport with plenty of additional storage space, just in case of anything.
Seriously, the older I get the more I find out that everything old is new again.
HTTP was designed for document retrieval at CERN not for applications. Applications over HTTP is now 20 yr old hack. A protocol that handles state, ACID transactions and persitency in a clean well architected way is the need.
http://xkcd.com/927/
There's already several very fine general purpose languages without considering inventing more. Maybe they could port Java or C# to the web and finally get rid of the mess that is javascript and php and then we can do some really cool stuff.
Wait.. Maybe we can have some way to download code to run later. Maybe contained in a convenient package that is automatically added or removed from your system, and which we can use even if there is _gasp!_ no internet at all. We could get games and software without ever having to visit a webpage or even open a browser! It will be an amazing and revolutionary concept never tried before!
Just adapt existing languages so that they run inside web containers?
There are currently several HUNDRED different programming languages available right now. Why the fuck do we need more? Why does everyone feel the need to crank out new 'languages', when 90% of them are just derivatives of existing stuff and don't actually provide anything of value apart from making things that much more difficult for developers in general?
We need *less* languages, not more. Software quality has gotten really bad over the past few years, in large part because there are so many people out there who think that they're a programmer just because they know how to write a couple lines of code with the latest language du jour, and others just nod their head and accept it because it's 'new' and therefore 'better'.
Call me a fogey if you want, but tell me this... If you knew that every building you walked into, or every bridge you drove over, was created with yet another measurement system because the previous one was 'old and busted', or used brand new materials solely because the materials were new, how comfortable would you be?
So this 'engineer' explains that we need more web based apps because it's better than local apps but the web sucks so we need to be able to run the web apps locally.
I think he missed out on noting that even if you run these apps locally because you web sucks, you won't get far because all the libraries and data that the web app is using are on the webclouds.
He is missing his own point.
Both have nothing but crap to show for their efforts.
Web browsers should at this point be able to parse some sort of bytecode that can be translated to native. This way anyone can use whatever programming language he or she pleases. Google did a great work with PNaCL, but I don't think that will ever gain traction from the other vendors.
Mozilla's ASM.JS is much better idea and much closer to a real-life usage scenario, but Google itself is not doing enough to promote it and their support is half assed (even though It would definitely benefit them).
There are already plenty of languages that do everything I want. Frankly I don't need or want another language. More platforms would be nice though.
...to distract people from the sexy new non-web language from the fruit factory.
The problem is that we even have a concept of "Web" programming. There should be no such thing. It reminds me of the early 90's when we had Multimedia programs - those that could access a CD-ROM. It doesn't matter where you are running, where you data is, and where your output is. We need ALL of our programming languages to be updated to realize this. We don't write to files, we write to streams. Data is always just written to a store. The fact that the local store synchronizes with the server store is a library issue. We should be able to create "Web" programs with the same tools that we write all programs.
Some settling may occur during posting.
If you go out of your way to invent a broken limited language, you'll just regret it later. Adding in all the stuff you thought you wouldn't need (but of course did) will make it look like a dirty hack, because that's exactly what it'll be.
Whatever project you're working on, you should write it in a general all-purpose programming language. If you're convinced no one has invented a good language yet (you weirdo) ok, go for it. But FFS don't call it a "web" language, because if your language is successful, I guarantee you'll be using it in non-web contexts.
Example: I have written and maintain some classical stdin-to-stdout Unix-mindset filters written in PHP, not because PHP is good (it's not!) but so I could use ("include") some of the same code that the website uses. And let me tell you, all the really dumb stupid short-sighted decisions that PHP's inventors' made because they (correctly) thought they were just making a limited toy web language, are always there in my face. I've just trained myself to not really see the problems anymore. But if we had used a traditional language instead, the payoff would have been many times over. And yes, even on the website itself.
Outputting HTML is such a tiny, tiny part of most websites' code these days. You don't need "special language features" for handling that one insignificant case.
Brilliant. Everything is anything except when it is not.
This guy is clueless. There are plenty of programming languages available, Java being the BEST for serious we development. He needs to learn a real language instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Too much time on his hands at google.
I think we might say we need a better language. That said, the web is a riskier medium from a security stand point. I don't know if I want more powerful programs running at that level because you could as easily have worms written into the damned things.
I already use noscript on most sites to disable everything but HTML. I really don't want to put up with more of this stuff since most of just makes the site slower, delivers ads, tracks my movements on the internet, or attempts to throw pop ups all over the place.
I'd just assume have the coding on sites remain as simple as possible.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
because everyone in the world who really matters is ignoring Dart the same way we ignore all other spurious, useless, wastes of time.
20% slack time is admirable... but trust me, not every idea attached to the Google name is worth the time it took to write this post.
What it takes to create more great app is more about a decent support for modern form elements than a new way to tweak stupid useless dom elements endlessy. How about native table with locked rows/tables ? How about native searchable combos ? etc etc etc... Yes, we can reinvent this weel forever via jQuery + some plugin + ..., but it takes so much wasted energy to do so.
Another language is not necessary a bad thing, it's just not a priority to me. Far from that. Javascript is quite decent when you take the time to use it rigth.
So they are saying the reason the desktop is winning is because it has hundreds and hundreds of programming languages to choose from?
Never mind that 99% of all programs are written in C/C++ and .9% use Java/C#.
If anything the web actually has more *actively used* languages. To be a web developer you need to know JS/JQ, PHP, HTML, HTML5, XML, CSS, Flash/AS, and maybe a little Perl, ActiveX, ect.
99% of desktop developers only know C++, and only need to know C++. If you want to be highly adaptable know how to work in Java based languages and work with DBs.
This Google Engineer is a certified idiot.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Except once it's offline it's no longer contained...
How? Pretty much every major platform other than Windows desktop, OS X, and GNU/Linux has some sort of containment measure by default. This includes Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8's WinRT subsystem, Android, iOS, and modern game consoles.
We need to keep creating jobs even though we could already build a leisure society.
Let's create a morass of languages so confusing that no one really knows what anyone does anymore. Profit!
Accessibility in the sense of being able to use my app (and my data) at home, at work, while riding the train; webmail is a classic example.
Which webmail providers support downloading of new messages while online to read while offline? This is a requirement for use "while riding the train" without another $500/yr cellular bill for each device.
On the server side it's already pretty easy to use whatever language you want.
Unless the server refuses to execute executables in the user's directory.. This is common on, say, low-end shared web hosting plans that provide PHP and only PHP.
Application Cache allows the specification of which components are cached locally and can be programmatically cleared when needed. LocalStorage allows storing at least 5MB of data offline. Both of these can be utilized to make a functional "offline" webapp in HTML/CSS/Javascript. More storage would be nice (IE actually offers 10MB), but offline apps isn't due to lack of languages.
That's been tried. Unfortunately, the virtual machine was implemented so incompetently that web browsers now require the user to add sites using this language to the user's personal whitelist.
Having to ship fourteen apps for fourteen platforms is not fun, especially when you could make, test, and deploy a web app before even completing the paperwork to become a licensed developer on half those platforms.
I don't know what Bracha has up his sleeve but I know if he's recommending it it won't be good for the rest of us!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You see yacc, yet another compiler compiler, is feeling very lonely. So the busybodies of the village have gathered together and are tying to setup yacc with yawl, yet another web language. It is perfect. Match made in heaven. Each is fulfilled by the other. Each have the other as their raison d`etre .
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Like this is done already.
The whole point of the web was for an easy way to view readable text documents. HTTP superceded Gopher but in my honest opinion HTTP combined with scriptable interaction has become bloatware. I would much prefer to read information via Gopher than HTTP. It is easier.
Let's stay with Javascript...
This has nothing to do with programming languages. It's the entire server / HTTP / HTML / web browser infrastructure he's complaining about. You've got a document format (html), originating from servers (PHP / Java / whatever) with embedded scripts (javascript), which can dynamically modify the HTML document (DOM / DHTML), as well as making additional requests to and from the server ("AJAX"), most recently extended via rich multimedia standards (WebGL, Web Audio API). The whole thing is a kludge that has expanded from HTML into.... whatever this huge mess has become after layer after layer of more stuff thrown on top (HTML5?).
Replacing the one little part of all that, javascript, with some other language, would only make things even more convoluted and complex. What he really wants is Flash and Java Apps. And how well did those technologies pan out as universal cross platform environments in the long run (and no, Java as used in Android does not count, as it only runs inside a single platform called Android). IMO, Apple has done us a favor in rejecting both Flash and Java on iOS. They've given two developers choices. One, feel free to use HTML as far as you're willing to try and push it. Good luck with that beyond anything reasonable as far as interactivity and responsiveness with HTML on a mobile device. Two, create dedicated applications for the target platforms (iOS, Android, whatever).
What this Google engineer is wanting is to be able to create dedicated applications without having to create dedicated applications. He wants to implement something that runs optimally on iOS without having to do any iOS software development. I have news for him... Apple has 100% control over that universe right now, and he will not be getting his way any time in the near future.
Better known as 318230.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Enjoy!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Some of our best CS minds are already working on it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Thank you. That was the first realistic assessment I've noticed so far in this discussion.
There is no programming language that is ideal for all contexts, nor any VM that supports all use cases well. There can't be, because there are some fundamentally contradictory goals that simply can't be fully reconciled. For example, you can't have a language that efficiently manipulates hardware for systems programming yet which also lets you run general applications downloaded from untrusted sources in a safe sandbox. The trick is to pick out the common elements and principles that are shared by some of the cases, and pool that work as much as possible so the maximum resources can go into making each tool better in its particular niche.
It's good that people who have grown up with "web apps" are starting to notice these issues that are old friends in the wider programming world, and that the Web world is starting to run into hard problems and realise that there aren't always easy solutions to them. This will inevitably lead to greater maturity in the technologies we use on the Web. But that doesn't mean the Web world somehow magically has answers that no-one else who's been working on this for the last 30/40/50 years has found.
Ironically, possibly the biggest lost opportunity in recent years is that Microsoft could have shifted the whole industry for the better just by having a decent, standardised install/upgrade process for native applications on Windows desktops. If they had produced something with the ease of use we now expect from mobile app stores, but the range of grown up applications we expect from a serious operating system and the freedom and support for developers that Microsoft used to champion for many years, then they might have disrupted the killer feature of Web apps -- which IMHO is the near zero friction ease of getting hold of them -- almost overnight. Throw in a decent set of tools for supporting client/server communications, and what advantages do Web apps really have left over native-but-distributed development?
Sadly, MS never really solved that problem, and so instead of today's new programmers growing up with a wide variety of native languages and run-time environments that built on decades of successful language and VM evolution, we get stuck with the joke that is Javascript, a bunch of server-side languages that all look much the same when you strip away trivial syntactic differences, and worst of all, insane amounts of development effort going into building several variations of ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of what a cutting edge VM should have been by now, all locked up in different browsers where nothing but Web apps can even use it. The rise of Web apps has probably regressed the software industry by at least a decade and counting. :-(
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You should upgrade your hosting to something equally cheap which offers proper language support.
I agree. But some people end up signing up for hosting without proper language support, unaware of all the options because becoming aware itself has costs, and then their needs grow while they're still locked into a contract.
'The Web is always available, except when it is not,'
That was dumb. And o-so-Goglish.
Maybe if you live in an urban area the web is nearly ubiquitous and nearly always on but even then the lights go out.
Out in more rural areas the web is not everywhere and not always on.
So Google's only talking for the half the population living in cities. Better have a paper back book available for when the lights go off, or relearn how to talk to other people...
Again I don't use those other platforms. What incentive do I as an end user have to use this slow, doesn't use the features of my platform of choice, need to jump though the hoops of opening my web browser and navigating to the site to use, web app?
Do 100% of your contacts use the same platform as you? If not, the advantage is that you get to communicate with people who use a different platform. Imagine, for example, if Facebook were available only for OS X and iOS. True, mail can be done with just standard protocols (SMTP AUTH, POP3, IMAP), but a lot of providers charge extra for the convenience of using standard protocols because they can't insert messages from sponsors. Other providers abandon standard protocols when noise exceeds the provider's ability to filter it out of the signal, such as Google's switch from XMPP-based Talk to proprietary Hangouts. And in a lot of cases other than mail, providers haven't managed to agree on a protocol.
As an end user I don't care how easy or hard it is.
Other than that as an end user, if it's too hard for the developer, you end up getting no app to use at all.
So a guy who makes an alternative language for web programming thinks we need options! OMFG!
Let's remember, we had options; they died. People bitch about JavaScript, but it was so dominant that it killed VBScript, Applets, ActiveX, JavaFX, and now it has Flash on the ropes. As "horrible" JavaScript is, it is the best. And having one language is nice because it keeps everything compatible.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Not that Javascript doesn't have faults, but what exactly is it about Javascript that means it can't be used offline? The only real hurdles to writing 'offline' apps in Javascript are the lack of traditional local file access and other anti-cross-site-scripting features in browsers which have nothing to do with Javascript itself and everything to do with security concerns that would affect any 'web language'.
I give you, for example, GitHub's new "Atom" editor which, as far as I can tell, is mostly Javascript, running in its own gimped version of Chromium with the local file access API enabled. I assume Adobe Brackets is the same. Any 'offline' Javascript code that you've written in Node.JS are obviously a figment of your imagination, too.
Meanwhile, languages that "compile" to Javascript as if it were bytecode seem to work quite well, like the aforementioned 'Dart', Coffeescript, Haxe and Google Web Toolkit (which compiles Java to JavaScript). From what I've seen, although they ain't gonna be used for climate modelling or big data anytime soon, their performance is quite adequate for the sort of thing that web apps need to do.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Look how well all those IE 6 only apps worked out. Now that was computin'!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We don't need even ONE more programming language. We need at most one or two programming languages that aren't shit.
IMHO upgrading javascript to a full blown programming language that can run in, or outside of a browser would be sufficient. Contrary to beliefs of idiots who think programming should be difficult, there's no value in making anyone learn an entirely new syntax and language to get some mundane work done. It's a programming language. They all do the same thing.
Bottom line? Expanding a current programming language to do more work makes ECONOMIC sense. Forcing any programmers do something new to satisfy the vision of a 20-something whiz kid or clueless CEO (Cough,...Ballmer, Cough) who has no awareness of the money invested in existing code bases, technologies, or your business model does not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Everything new is not always an improvement. Let's dump some of bad ones like javascript and java and c# and crap like that. Let's clean up some of the keepers like perl, php and python and c. Hell... I'd like to see pascal make a come back, it was never a bad language, it just didn't get the love it deserved. Lets get back to true compiled languages. I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing object oriented go away but that's probably too much to hope for. Now let the attacks begin... 8^)
*More* languages? Rather than, say, hire folks with experience (and pay more for them), he's proposing fragmenting the market still more, cutting people with real world experience out in favor of someone who's "experience" is writing code in one of their professors' favorite language, or the one that the prof invented for publish or perish? And when many of these are no longer popular in two or three years, pushed out by newer, hot languages, who's going to maintain your website? And will security and bugfix updates keep coming for the years that site will be kept running until some manager gets enough money to have it rewritten in the next new language?
And when you and the other two or three folks who know the language leave your job, who are they going to find to maintain and enhance it?
And how much *real* difference is there, beyond new buzzwords and a newly-renamed/rewritten function or 40 of them? Anything, rather than learn how to use the tools that are there, and maybe there's a bunch of people older than you that know them better?
mark
And we'll name it 'YetAnotherProgrammingLanguage' or YAPL for short.
This happens because the desktop UI has "spoiled" users and application requesters. We as developers cannot say "it can't be done" because it can be done and they've seen web applications or demos that do make their browser act like a desktop GUI.
However, the web standards are poorly fitted for desktop-style GUI's such that we have to "force it" with tricks and micromanaging low-level details with kludges, including dealing with browser-version-specific differences.
But forcing it results in a web application that is expensive to build and especially difficult to maintain. The result is that the requester balks at the initial cost, and then balks again when maintenance is an even bigger expensive headache. Thus, the requester is double pissed.
I believe it's time to rethink how web-served UI's are done. A new "GUI markup language" perhaps should be invented that does most of the common desktop-like GUI idioms declaratively (as markup) to reduce the need for direct GUI coding in JavaScript or whatnot.
Java applets and Flash gave of a taste of GUI-centric engines. But applets have awkward API's and don't integrate well with existing HTML browsers. Flash provided decent GUI's and API's, but Flash is proprietary, limiting its reach, and also suffers from the HTML integration problem.
A key lesson from Java and Flash is that a new GUI markup standard is probably going to have to be a super-set of HTML so that the HTML content and the GUI content don't have to run on different engines or panels. Hopefully it will also have an open-source version.
Table-ized A.I.
It's the way things are already headed. All the web browser/server did was give us a way to deploy code on the fly to a known environment (the browser). Browser technology with HTML5 has already introduced methods of storing stuff locally (data & code) for offline use. I don't see this as something we need, I see it as something we're in the process of getting. (Of course if we get more of it, that's even better. Choices are cool). The one thing I'd like to see is native browser support for pre-compiled javascript. That way, web developers can use a native browser language but not worry about their code being reverse engineered or altered on the fly. (Yeah I know this happens with all languages, compiled or otherwise, but we don't have to leave it wide open).
I welcome new languages as well, but so many new ones are just rehashes of old ones with some shiny things added. And those shiny things get severe dents when the language matures to version 7 point something.
Perl Programmer for hire
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The offline use of the Internet is a good idea, but our actual Internet is "broken". We need a new one first a.s.a.p., so we can implement new ideas. When a big project (like Internet) gonna loose for too long, we need to think in refactor (or re-invent) it first.
"Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said."
*facepalm* Intellectualism...
a dick.
I want a module to run bash in apache. This would be so sick. probably more or less a little dangerous as it would directly interact with system binaries, but just think how awesome it would be.
or mabey bash+busybox in a container?
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
Trying to cut me down there? Hey - that's OK as that's the "1 I owe you" for your comments TODAY, so I am letting it pass, as YOU DID ME A GIANT FAVOR vs. a competitor, finding an issue in Almost All Ads Blocked Plus etc.!
So, in the end? I have kept my promise to you, payback IS A BITCH though now, eh? LOL!
APK
P.S.=> Sure this is "payback" too for being a wiseass to you also, but it will be the ONLY one, as you don't DARE show your face over there in that link (lol, especially now)... apk
isn't this all really about making proprietary things and steal privacy?
OS, browser, scripting language for browser, IDE, mobile browser, ect
I see this as the 'browser wars' by different means...
everything should be as interoperable as possible...which would be fewer programming languages b/c there would be less need to translate between abstractions created to lock-in users to one system or track/steal their data
Thank you Dave Raggett
So that'd be about five lines in awk, right?
It's time for more "Perls before swine".....
I'd be happy with just one that didn't suck.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
These guys take the cake for the world's WORST user interfaces. They don't need more programming languages. They need to learn how to make USABLE programs with the languages they have, first. My latest favorite example: YouTube history lists are sorted RANDOMLY. I have a history list with nearly 2000 views. Now I want to find a vid I watched last week. WTF? It's no help at all. It allows me to clear the list, which might have helped if I did it a month ago, but not now. So I go off trying to find it by searching from memory. No luck, and now I've added several dozen additional views to my even more useless history list in the process. Microsoft will do dumb things, but usually I can figure out what they were trying to accomplish. The only thing that seems to explain Google on the other hand, is BRAIN DAMAGE.
1. Reinvent desktop application concept in a new language
2. Give it a funny name like "Long-Term Cached Web Application" to disguise it from the clueless
3. Patent it
4. Sue existing desktop companies like Microsoft for royalties
5. Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
I'm constantly switching between languages (and frameworks): PHP (Symfony 2), Javascript (Angular, Bootstrap), HTML (with Angular directives), CSS, SQL (MySQL), DQL (Doctrine) and their various ways of saying the same thing, that I can't wait to add EVEN MORE LANGUAGES to my projects. I'm working really hard to suppress adding other stuff to the above list and also to keep my code readable. And that's just for the web part of what I'm doing. I have a thousand more languages on the backend (I usually do C or Python, but Bash and friends are still very constantly present - migrating away from them, as I'm running out of ways to abuse that into something they weren't supposed to do: general purpose programming - still more readable than Perl mind you). Oh, and I almost forgot the mobile touch screen toy app languages (Java a la Android, Objective C, and now Swift - I don't do Windows - who does?).
Yes! I want more languages!
No, srsly. Dudes, if you're gonna make more languages, go do what Apple did: something that actually improves the order of things (Swift, again). There was a "easy to make web apps" framework out there that followed your "we need more languages" philosophy. I forget its name. It used CoffeeScript. The demo started with "let me show you how easy it is to write a blog". 5 minutes later the guy was already through like 10 different languages that I never heard of before, one for each aspect of the web app. NO! JUST NO! I want some time on the side for me too! I'm tired of being a walking Slashdot reader cliche you dickheads!
The Web programming language of the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.
Jesus, then get rid of HTML. Have the web "developers" keep their markup and scripting language, but it all needs to compile down to a lower-level standard that isn't categorically "web".
A simpler surface would be easier to secure, easier to implement and optimize per platform, and would free all the higher-level stuff to evolve under market forces instead of a ponderous standards committee.
Thatyou thankyou. This is the problem: all the existing options pretty much suck.
Wouldn't it be easier if someone just modified the web browsers to download the associated information locally, say with three stages, 1 until the browser window closes, 2 until the device shuts down, and 3, until the user manually deletes it...? The website wouldn't necessarily have the most updated information but it would work offline, and with that, when the user visits the website online again it would simply update their local copy. The user would have their preference on a per-website basis on how they want it stored, and with that there would be no general need for a new "web" language. That is assuming all of this would be legal to do with the powers that be.
Google is barking up the wrong tree. It's not that the web or the languages are flawed, it's that the serialization to HTML and JS and CSS is flawed.
There is no [big] reason why we can't drop the data serialization and program directly against webkit objects. Once you can manipulate webkit directly, you can do so from any language. It's only because we've locked ourselves in to the textual serialization of varying interpretations that we have the clusterfuck of today. Rather than interacting through a DOM, we could jsut provide the objects themsleves. Think if it this way, really just does: ti = new TextInput(); ti.setName("name")... The structure of these objects is organized in the DOM, which gives a parent-child relationship. We can get rid of the DOM as a serialized format and just link the objects together accordingly.
Think of it like this, when a web client talks to a web server they just have a textual interface open to various interpretations. With the object interface I describe, the client provides access to objects which are directly manipulated by the server. There is no ambiguity, aside from how the object is implemented in the client. In this way, someone can code for any implementation in perfect specificity, with only the assumption that the instantiated object behaves in accordance to the behavior spec. There is no reason the program code on the server cannot be stored on the client, however this is just user-interface client code.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
We've been having the "Why do we need the desktop" argument since Web 1.0. The last decent attempt at the web browser replacing the desktop I am aware of with enough detail to speak intelligently about was Microsoft's "Smart Client" concept, which in principle was pretty good, and worked inside the Enterprise, but never gained traction at the consumer level because it was completely dependent on MS's crappy browser.
Another language... wow does that argument go way back... to like, the seventies. We are overwhelmed with languages that all do exactly the same things. A while new operating system, with a whole new way of looking at everything has to come first.
Murphy was an optimist
Kind of scary that the stewardship of most of our collective online presence is managed by a company with employees who have opinions like that. Is "Google" saying that there are holes in the cloud?? I thought the cloud would cure the common cold. Well of course the cloud has holes, giant gaping opportunities for data theft, and loss of revenue. The cloud concept has caught on in the most potentially destructive way possible, namely relying on internet hosted resources to solve daily business problems. Its one thing to provide the ability to charge via the internet, another situation entirely when applications (like google apps and other SaaS RELY on it for their operation. IMHO we have too MANY languages now, C, C++, C#, VB, Java, PHP, etc not to mention JavaScript and such. The problem is that what we have is not even close to being used efficiently. The newer "languages" and I use that term loosely as I don't consider C# a language so much as a scripting tool (aka VB with manners). Biggest problem today is that basic programming skills have been lost in favor of "object oriented" thinking. Let someone else do the coding and I will just glom onto that. REALLY bad "strategery" there, reminds me of the way Windows "revolutionized IT management. As long as you could click and push buttons, surprise you are an IT person. "Programming" today isn't so much writing code, it is a lego approach to building things. Frankly anybody can plug widgets together and make something work. But there is a difference between working and working well. Most programmers I have meet in recent years are very deficient in basic logic and design skills. The whole reason that C++ exists is that wannabe programmers couldn't use pointers and linked lists and other complex structures and such used in "C" for example. Visual Basic was created to provide the ability to produce programs by non programmers as well. What the real issue is today that I can see is that there is a REALLY big difference between IT programmers and computer scientist programmers. Businesses want people that can sit and crank code out "drones". VB and C# are the COBOL and PL-1 of the 21st century.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Yes we don't have enough web languages:
Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, tcl, Ruby, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Dart, Erlang, F#, ASP.NET, ...
And I'm leaving out the really old ones, the really new ones, and the really esoteric ones. My list, my rules.