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Maybe browser makers could expose a few lower level constructs in JS to make efforts like CoffeeScript, Objective-J and GWT easier? That could be a short term

by Detrus 16y ago

Maybe browser makers could expose a few lower level constructs in JS to make efforts like CoffeeScript, Objective-J and GWT easier? That could be a short term solution. Long term we have to hope that LLVM and NaCl pick up steam. But many languages for the same tasks will create fragmentation. Right now there is a big pool of developers proficient in JS. They even use the same libraries! The libraries are where a lot of productivity gains come from. The web became an "easy" platform to develop for. With fragmentation that could be lost. CoffeeScript is interoperable with JS, easy to pick up because it's mainly a cleanup, but Objective-J and GWT are too far out. GWT needs a reworked JQuery, called GQuery. So there are these economic considerations that are probably more important than language preference.

tolmasky 16y ago
Not sure what you mean by Objective-J being too far out. Objective-J is much closer and "interoperable" with JS than CoffeeScript because it is a strict superset of JavaScript (in other words, all JavaScript is also Objective-J). Practically what this means is that any existing JS works alongside Objective-J with no changes whatsoever, the syntaxes do not "collide". The difference between ObjJ and JS are comparable to ECMAScript 2 and 5 (additions of new features and keywords)
- jashkenas 16y ago
  Not to be combative, but I think what he means is this: Although it's perfectly easy to use JavaScript from Objective-J, the same is not true in reverse. ObjJ generates code that looks like this: objj_msgSend(objj_msgSend(CPIndexSet,"alloc"), "initWithIndexSet:",_selectedRowIndexes); ... where objj_msgSend is how the Objective-J "interpreter" does it's magic. If I wanted to use a library that was originally written in Objective-J, from JavaScript, I'd have a hell of a hard time calling it correctly, unless the library author took special care to make it JavaScript-compatible in the first place. The syntaxes may not collide, but the semantics certainly don't match up. On the other hand, you'd never know that you were calling a CoffeeScript library from JS, unless you inspected the source, and vice-versa. In that sense, they're interoperable.
  - tolmasky 16y ago
    No not combative at all, what you say makes perfect sense. I suppose the confusion arose because he bundled objj with gwt, saying you'd need a totally different jquery, which is certainly not the case with objj.

by Detrus 16y ago

tolmasky 16y ago

Not sure what you mean by Objective-J being too far out. Objective-J is much closer and "interoperable" with JS than CoffeeScript because it is a strict superset of JavaScript (in other words, all JavaScript is also Objective-J). Practically what this means is that any existing JS works alongside Objective-J with no changes whatsoever, the syntaxes do not "collide". The difference between ObjJ and JS are comparable to ECMAScript 2 and 5 (additions of new features and keywords)

jashkenas 16y ago
Not to be combative, but I think what he means is this: Although it's perfectly easy to use JavaScript from Objective-J, the same is not true in reverse. ObjJ generates code that looks like this: objj_msgSend(objj_msgSend(CPIndexSet,"alloc"), "initWithIndexSet:",_selectedRowIndexes); ... where objj_msgSend is how the Objective-J "interpreter" does it's magic. If I wanted to use a library that was originally written in Objective-J, from JavaScript, I'd have a hell of a hard time calling it correctly, unless the library author took special care to make it JavaScript-compatible in the first place. The syntaxes may not collide, but the semantics certainly don't match up. On the other hand, you'd never know that you were calling a CoffeeScript library from JS, unless you inspected the source, and vice-versa. In that sense, they're interoperable.
- tolmasky 16y ago
  No not combative at all, what you say makes perfect sense. I suppose the confusion arose because he bundled objj with gwt, saying you'd need a totally different jquery, which is certainly not the case with objj.