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.

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Why?

[putaro]

Those do exist, for example Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which spits out Javascript and HTML from Java code that you write and manages the communications between the Javascript in the web page and the Java code running on the server. There are difficulties, though, because Javascript and HTML are really kind of sucky for running GUIs and it takes tweaking to get everything looking good in every browser.

Personally, I think that running complex applications inside the browser is just plain stupid but it keeps on getting pushed at us.

Re:Why?

[jythie]

Because developing new languages and ecosystems is fun, sexy, and gets you attention. Working in old fuddy languages with rich existing support requires reading books and bowing to other people who have already figured problems out. Bad for the ego.

Re: Why?

[jd2112]

The API of the current version is quite large, but the next release will be smaller. By version 2.0 they expect to have it down to a few pages.

Re:No, we don't

[mwvdlee]

There are far too many choices now.

JavaScript and VBScript.
I agree there is atleast one choice too many.

The good thing about standards...

[menkhaura]

The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Oblig. xkcd

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/927/

Re:Translation

[NatasRevol]

It should be called the Tower of Babbage.

Re:Or maybe...

[BasilBrush]

I'm a old fogey. And I welcome new programming languages. Because the existing ones suck so much.

When do you suggest we should have stopped? With COBOL as the major language? or C? With PHP as the major web language? With PERL is the major scripting language?

Bring forth every language anyone wishes to invent, and let the good ones rise to the top.

Software quality is a different issue. And most of it is in unrelated to language. But on the language side, new languages can help. Take Swift vs Objective-C. Many or most fatal bugs and security vulnerabilities with C languages revolve around stray pointers, exceeding bounds, and omitting breaks in case statements or braces around if blocks. These are simply not possible in the new language. And thus software quality will be improved.

Re:No, we don't

[PRMan]

Yep, and even if you use the correct tool for the job people rewrite it anyway. I used XSLT to turn XML into a different XML. It was 20 lines and worked great. I came back later and somebody had replaced it with 2500 lines of C#.

Containment by default

[tepples]

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.