Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
To return to a theme I started many years ago, I commented on this excellent article about why web-site development has got so damned hard. (And remember when we all thought of web-apps as lighter and simpler than desktop apps? What happened?)
Anyway, here's my comment.
I think the problem is less the multiplicity of programming languages, than our insistence that we should always be separating our languages in different places.
This goes against the basic tenets of cohesion and coupling. We cluster unrelated activities together because they happen to have the same syntactic sugar, while separating tightly-coupled activities because half of them happen on the client and the other on the server. Why the hell should this implementation detail have to be reflected in our architecture?
What I'd like, controversially, is to be able to mix-and-match the languages within the same source file, grouping together the python, javascript, html and sql that actually has to work together in one place. I have no trouble dropping into regular expressions or similar DSLs from inside my main code, why should dropping into a layout or query language be different?
Anyway, here's my comment.
I think the problem is less the multiplicity of programming languages, than our insistence that we should always be separating our languages in different places.
This goes against the basic tenets of cohesion and coupling. We cluster unrelated activities together because they happen to have the same syntactic sugar, while separating tightly-coupled activities because half of them happen on the client and the other on the server. Why the hell should this implementation detail have to be reflected in our architecture?
What I'd like, controversially, is to be able to mix-and-match the languages within the same source file, grouping together the python, javascript, html and sql that actually has to work together in one place. I have no trouble dropping into regular expressions or similar DSLs from inside my main code, why should dropping into a layout or query language be different?
Monday, September 14, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
This is an absolutely brilliant summary of the virtues of PHP.
The important point is that these virtues aren't going away. By comparison this seems to miss the point. In 2020 we won't be programming the web with an advanced Python framework (wonderful as python is). We'll have something which does what PHP did for CGI or Processing does Java, ie. wrap a purpose built, sophisticated back-end (something like Google Application Engine) in a light, domain-specific language. That language won't look like PHP. It would be nice if it looked like Python, but I suspect Javascript is a more likely model.
But it will retain the virtues of PHP : none of this fussy separation of presentation and logic; easy discoverability of where URLs go; fast iterative development; big built-in library etc.
(Hat-tip, BillSeitz for the links)
The important point is that these virtues aren't going away. By comparison this seems to miss the point. In 2020 we won't be programming the web with an advanced Python framework (wonderful as python is). We'll have something which does what PHP did for CGI or Processing does Java, ie. wrap a purpose built, sophisticated back-end (something like Google Application Engine) in a light, domain-specific language. That language won't look like PHP. It would be nice if it looked like Python, but I suspect Javascript is a more likely model.
But it will retain the virtues of PHP : none of this fussy separation of presentation and logic; easy discoverability of where URLs go; fast iterative development; big built-in library etc.
(Hat-tip, BillSeitz for the links)
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