3 ms·

The idea is intriguing. What if we think about tying a language to a library rather than the other way around? Lisp and Forth both had the idea that you should

The idea is intriguing. What if we think about tying a language to a library rather than the other way around? Lisp and Forth both had the idea that you should be able to build your language around the needs of your application, rather than the other way around, and this kind of source compilation feels like the extension of the idea. (Yes, we could always do the same thing, and often have, but not in web-world.)

gte910h 14y ago
The web is a really weird platform for this though: There are SO many places the lower level language (the one you're translating to) has to properly handle, that DSLs feel like a big risk to many people I'm personally looking forward to stuff like "CoffeScript, a 5 year retrospective" etc, to show how safe all that stuff ended up being long term
- ghempton 14y ago
  Can you elaborate on some places where "low-level" javascript is needed?
  - gte910h 14y ago
    Unfortunately, no I can't. I don't know where the frameworks break in 2013. Been off the web for too long.
mhd 14y ago
This is basically what Vala is doing for glib/gtk (and it transpiles, too). Languages with a more flexible syntax probably don't need it as much, of course (lisp, forth, SmallTalk, tcl etc.).
pavlov 14y ago
Now that Objective-C finally has shorthand creation syntax for NSDictionary and NSArray, the language is officially tied to a particular library (Foundation -- although there are of course other implementations in addition to Apple's).