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Well nodeJS is doing a decent job by having the same language on the server side as on the clientside. css and html are both markup-lanugages and I find it ver

by arianvp 15y ago

Well nodeJS is doing a decent job by having the same language on the server side as on the clientside. css and html are both markup-lanugages and I find it very strange to add turing-completeness to a markup language. well there are examples where this IS the case, look at LaTeX for example. But having html as the frontend, and both clientside and serverside javascript as the backend is the closest that we can get at this moment.

nxn 15y ago
There are JavaScript UI libs that handle the HTML/CSS for you like ExtJS. You'd still need to at least supply a single HTML file that just loads the js files though, but that hardly requires knowing HTML/CSS. After that the whole presentation layer is pretty much defined with JS and JSON. That's in theory though -- in practice I wouldn't expect to get very far before not knowing html and css became a significant hurdle while developing a web app. Anyway, these days I wouldn't even suggest building web apps as a starting point for someone's programming related career; it's just too big of a mess of languages, frameworks, and libraries. I think just about any academic curriculum aimed at application development starts off with basic console applications, works up to GUI apps, and then goes to the web. By then hopefully you see some patterns emerge that make learning new tech easier on you. Then again, ironically, I did start to learn programming via the web through PHP, so I guess it can be done. The thing that helped me was that I already had a few years of experience working with static HTML, and I understood the problems PHP was trying to solve and felt the need for a solution myself. This was in the late 90s or early 2000s though, things were still a lot simpler back then than they are now. Websites didn't absolutely depend on JavaScript, you didn't have to know anything about AJAX, seeing CSS was fancy since having style information in your html was still common. I don't know, if I think about learning all of it at once from scratch these days I want to vomit and have a seizure. So yeah, to answer the OPs question, I guess I do see how the benefits of unifying and abstracting a lot of the pieces out might be useful.

by arianvp 15y ago

nxn 15y ago

There are JavaScript UI libs that handle the HTML/CSS for you like ExtJS. You'd still need to at least supply a single HTML file that just loads the js files though, but that hardly requires knowing HTML/CSS. After that the whole presentation layer is pretty much defined with JS and JSON. That's in theory though -- in practice I wouldn't expect to get very far before not knowing html and css became a significant hurdle while developing a web app. Anyway, these days I wouldn't even suggest building web apps as a starting point for someone's programming related career; it's just too big of a mess of languages, frameworks, and libraries. I think just about any academic curriculum aimed at application development starts off with basic console applications, works up to GUI apps, and then goes to the web. By then hopefully you see some patterns emerge that make learning new tech easier on you. Then again, ironically, I did start to learn programming via the web through PHP, so I guess it can be done. The thing that helped me was that I already had a few years of experience working with static HTML, and I understood the problems PHP was trying to solve and felt the need for a solution myself. This was in the late 90s or early 2000s though, things were still a lot simpler back then than they are now. Websites didn't absolutely depend on JavaScript, you didn't have to know anything about AJAX, seeing CSS was fancy since having style information in your html was still common. I don't know, if I think about learning all of it at once from scratch these days I want to vomit and have a seizure. So yeah, to answer the OPs question, I guess I do see how the benefits of unifying and abstracting a lot of the pieces out might be useful.