On Jan 27, 2009, at 1:05 PM, Michaeljohn Clement wrote:
+1
This is the conclusion I have come to in building collaborative
Web applications.
I agree that there seems to be a gap here in the Haskell Web
frameworks people are building.
Yes. It's a dead end and it seems a shame to waste effort on it.
I do not believe compiling Haskell to ECMAScript/JavaScript is a
productive avenue. There is too much pain in trying to abstract
away the JavaScript model only to write everything in Haskell and
end up with worse performance as a reward.
I believe GWT, among other projects, has shown that you can create
faster executing JavaScript by compiling from a statically-typed
language than you can by hand-coding JavaScript (for one, you can do a
multitude of inlining and simplification transformations that are not
easy in a dynamic language). There is much room for research and
development, of course, especially in the context of functional
languages.
There is very little wrong with ECMAScript if people would only
learn it properly and play to its strengths instead of trying to
turn it into things it is not.
I like JavaScript, and I love ECMAScript 4 (which unfortunately won't
see the light of day), but they are not functional languages. And for
the foreseeable future, there is one and exactly one scripting
language for the browser, and anyone who wants to use a different
language will have to do so by compiling to JavaScript.
Regards,
John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration
http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101
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