Ray, you continue to labour under the mistaken impression that WebMacro
script language is intended to be a general purpose programming language.
First you compared it to lisp, now you threaten to pull out RMS's
critique of TCL. Meanwhile you talk about writing complex logic to deal
with selecting between 50+ views from within the script language. You
talk about deeply nested function calls down many levels of view. And
on and on it goes for pages.
The whole point of WebMacro is that such designs are *bad*.
You continue to look at WebMacro script as if it were the main part of
a WebMacro application, and it bugs you that you don't find a full
fledged programming language when you look there. You insist on wanting
to use a tool that lets you do generic, turing-complete programming
inside the template view.
Well, I think that's the wrong way to design dynamic websites.
The right thing to do is move as much of the complexity as you possibly
can into Java code, where a programmer can express it elegantly. WM
provides you with three different ways to do this. In 95% of cases you
will be fine with a bunch of logic in a servlet, a couple of utilities,
and your collection of templates.
4% of the time that won't be enough, and you'll have to build some fairly
sophisticated logic into the backend tools, and plug them in. In these
cases a graphics designer will have to collaborate with a Java programmer
to build the site--but in ANY language that would be true. An HTML hack
isn't going to be able to cope with the complexity othewise, whether
in JSP, XSL, or anything.
In about 1% of the cases you actually have truly complex recursive
structures. These are awkward to deal with in WM without the #macro
and #filter directives that are in development now--but let's be
clear that we're talking about a small number of pages in a small
number of applications.
WM's development has been directed by the pragmatic needs of the people
using it, so the rarely needed features, like this, are being implemented
last.
At any rate, I think you are so biased by your JSP-centric view of the
world that you are never going to understand my point.
You will respond to this message, like all the others, claiming that
WebMacro's script is not a turing-complete programming langauge, and
you will think there is something profound in your saying that.
Try developing something significant in WebMacro sometime. Give it
enough of a chance that you can see past your biases and see the
value of NOT putting that much complexity into your template/view.
You might learn something.
At any rate, I think we're going to go round in circles now, and I
really only wanted to correct a few misconceptions (such as that WM
script is supposed to be a programming language, or should be, etc.)
so I think we're done.
Justin
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