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I absolutely agree with the author! Remembering programming GUI applications in 90th it feels that there is a huge regression. Just to add, it is not enough to

by reirob 16y ago

I absolutely agree with the author! Remembering programming GUI applications in 90th it feels that there is a huge regression. Just to add, it is not enough to know 1 single programming language - you need 4: HTML (not really programming but still syntacs and semantics to learn), JavaScript, server side language (php, java, ...), SQL. Not talking about all the different configuration languages that might be needed (XML, ...). Not yet speaking of the difficulties for session handling. Where are all those nice innovations from the past MVC, OODBs, ... It would be great to have ONE single language that is enough to build a reasonably complex web site without having to cope with all the other syntaxes. I think that because of this something like Node.js might have success, even if I don't like JavaScript. But I still don' t get it why there are no persistent, performant, scalable data stores available inside programming languages itself (HappS seems promising for this, but then you still have to use JavaScript). I hope that after almost 2 decades something more simple will appear.

rhizome31 16y ago
It seems that nowadays you could in theory write web apps pretty much entirely in JavaScript. You mentioned Node.js for server-side logic. Then there are data stores that support JavaScript as a native query language (MongoDB, CouchDB...). For the client side, you can send an almost empty document to the browser and build the UI entirely in JS. Projects like CouchApps seem to head into that direction. However I'm not convinced that it's really a good thing for separation of concerns. You made a comparison with GUI development, but actually it's not uncommon to use a separate language to specify layouts when creating GUIs (Qt, Android...) The reason for that is that the declarative style of markup languages can often be a better fit than describing layouts programmatically. As for databases, it's great to have a (more or less) standard interface to query relational database that can easily be used from virtually any programming languages and from the command line. A lot of web apps are not limited to interact with a db and the filesystem but also need to interact with legacy systems. Less technical people might also want to be able to use off-the-shelf graphical tools to query the database. That might be a reason why ZODB, a Python-specific data store, hasn't been tremendously successful, despite meeting your requirements (notwithstanding scalability perhaps).

by reirob 16y ago

rhizome31 16y ago

It seems that nowadays you could in theory write web apps pretty much entirely in JavaScript. You mentioned Node.js for server-side logic. Then there are data stores that support JavaScript as a native query language (MongoDB, CouchDB...). For the client side, you can send an almost empty document to the browser and build the UI entirely in JS. Projects like CouchApps seem to head into that direction. However I'm not convinced that it's really a good thing for separation of concerns. You made a comparison with GUI development, but actually it's not uncommon to use a separate language to specify layouts when creating GUIs (Qt, Android...) The reason for that is that the declarative style of markup languages can often be a better fit than describing layouts programmatically. As for databases, it's great to have a (more or less) standard interface to query relational database that can easily be used from virtually any programming languages and from the command line. A lot of web apps are not limited to interact with a db and the filesystem but also need to interact with legacy systems. Less technical people might also want to be able to use off-the-shelf graphical tools to query the database. That might be a reason why ZODB, a Python-specific data store, hasn't been tremendously successful, despite meeting your requirements (notwithstanding scalability perhaps).