"Justin Johansson" <n...@spam.com> wrote in message news:hqk7ve$2ou...@digitalmars.com... > > my current thinking seems to be aligning with others that JavaScript > should be seen as the new "binary", albeit in text form, that HLLs should > be compiling down to for "webapp" development. > > > Also there is Haxe, http://haxe.org/ , which reminds me of D1, it being > small and concise, and, well, rather than my words, let me copy what the > intro page says: >
I believe *very* strongly in using a REAL language that then gets compiled down to worthless crap like PHP, ActionScript, etc., whenever such worthless crap platforms are necessary. Which is, of course, necessary FAR too often when you do web development, as I do. I use Haxe for any and all PHP and Flash development and I will *never* go back to direct PHP or ActionScript. Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER! PHP in particular is by far the absolute worst, most pathetic language *and* platform (PHP's idiocy extends far beyond the language itself) ever conceived and actually used in the real world (Ok, I'm not counting old mainframes). ActionScript2 and the Flash8 API are barely any better (and unfortunately, if you want *real* compatibility, AS3/Flash9 aren't really as much of an option as all the kiddie trend-whores that have infected the programming world like the pretend.) So yea, count me as one person who does go the Haxe route (including HaxeIgniter), swears by it (quite literally, as you can see ;) ), and will *never* look back. D, or at least something closer to D, would be FAR better than Haxe, though. In fact even though I just raved about Haxe, I actually hate Haxe. Yes, it's vastly superior to using direct PHP/AS, so much so that IMO there's no good reason ever to use PHP/AS directly. But Haxe is still crap anyway. Just off the top of my head, and I know I'm forgetting a lot: - The documentation is god-awful. - The allegedly-strong type system has one hell of a blatant and idiotic hole that probably won't get fixed: http://code.google.com/p/haxe/issues/detail?id=105 - Haxe has no real metaprogramming, and it's "generics" make C#'s gimped generics ( http://blog.dev-scene.com/abscissa/2008/03/10/i-want-my-iarithmetic/ ) look practically super-powered. (Granted, at least you can add two generic types in Haxe unlike C#, but in other ways they really are very, very limited.) - The syntax for defining properties is absolutely horrid, and will cause severe optical hemorrhaging in anyone who values DRY. Although, Java-type people who enjoy seeing how many millions of lines of useless boilerplate garbage their IDE can spit out while still accomplishing practically nothing will probably love it. - Everything must be in a class (or an enum)...for no apparent reason other than, apparently, to ape Java (and why anyone would ever want to ape Java is beyond me). - There are a lot of PITA PHP idiosyncrasies that Haxe doesn't really shield you from. (Example: Some dumbass sysadmin decided your PHP5 installation should have magic quotes enabled by default? You, as the app developer, still have to work around it. Haxe theoretically could automatically add code that detects and reverses it as best as possible. But it doesn't.) - I'm beginning to question the sanity of the guy in charge: http://code.google.com/p/haxe/issues/detail?id=106 (He blatantly breaks basic browser behavior for quite obviously no benefit whatsoever, he's spoon-fed a trivial fix, and...he passes it off as a user issue? WTF? Granted, it's not a major issue, but seriously, the lack of logic involved in coming to a conclusion like that just stuns me.) But yea, while Haxe has its issues, I'm still a huge proponent of the idea of compiling real languages does to the garbage ones when you're forced to use a garbage one. In fact, my Goldie project ( www.dsource.org/projects/goldie ) has that sort of thing as one of it's original motivating factors and one of its ultimate goals. However, I'm not convinced that compiling a full real language down to browser-client-JavaScript is a great idea... For one thing, something like that is going to have overhead (and JS is sluggish enough already), unless it goes the Haxe route and actually designs the language around the idea of very easy/direct translation to the base language, which of course, limits how much of an improvement the new language can actually be. The other issue I have with it is that I feel *VERY* strongly that JavaScript should *only be used sparingly*. Specifically, any web app *should* be designed and built from the start without any use of JavaScript whatsoever. This is possible 99.99% of the time (In fact, most of the times people think they need JS for something, they're full of crap. Like button rollover images, for instance: CSS handles rollover images FAR better than any JS engine ever will.) *Then* and *only* then, you can toss in little snippets of optional JS here and there to clean up various things for people who choose to have JS enabled. I know I'm in the minority on this, but I feel very strongly that that's the *only* good way to design a web app, anything else is just plain crap design. (Correction: there's no such thing as a good way to design a web app, because "good web app" is a blatant contradiction of terms since the web is an absolute shit platform for applications *period*. (/me waits for Adam Ruppe's DWS with baited breath :) ) So I guess I should have said that's the *closest* it can possibly get to being a "good" way to design a web app.) Whew! ... Can you tell I've been itching to get all that off my chest for quite some time? ;)