4 ms·

We went backwards when we went to the web in terms of development tools. It was necessary but RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we

We went backwards when we went to the web in terms of development tools. It was necessary but RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we are now today in the ability to put basic pieces together to make an application. I've not used visual studio in a long time, but I would hope they retained their core philosophy of reuse.

Zak 14y ago
RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we are now today in the ability to put basic pieces together to make an application Have you tried Django? It provides some rather large building blocks that fit together nicely and reasonable abstraction for constructing your own.
jes5199 14y ago
A symptom of this: we have Object Oriented languages that can't produce UI elements that are objects. And that's because we can't figure out how to let objects live from one web request to another? And that's because despite all the new database paradigms, nobody has made a widget-object model that can be saved to the database and reloaded transparently, and that's because our models of serializability of objects are brittle and unsafe (see the recent YAML bugs), and that's because we have no good systems for seamlessly migrating data structures from one version to another
- Zak 14y ago
  Objects do too much to live in a heterogeneous world. We'd do better serializing maps (JSON is popular, of course, but EDN is better) and operating on them using generic functions rather than trying to bind functionality to data. It's easy enough to serialize the properties of a UI widget when the functionality is data-driven and lives elsewhere.
  - jes5199 14y ago
    I think you're probably right? I mean, with the tools available in 2013, I certainly agree that the Clojure way is the least crazy. But I miss some OOP stuff when I'm doing that - like, I kinda like the organizational qualities of OOP; lots of the time I wish I had ruby-style polymorphism (on immutable structures?) instead of having to put all the logic in one function. Maybe that means I should just learn how to use defprotocol. But I guess that still doesn't give you an event model - what's the EDN equivalent of onClick ?
    - Zak 14y ago
      You should learn how to use records, protocols and hierarchies if you want to organize things that way in Clojure. You'll have to be a bit more ad-hoc about the same kinds of things when you're sending them to Javascript or storing them in a database.

Zak 14y ago

RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we are now today in the ability to put basic pieces together to make an application Have you tried Django? It provides some rather large building blocks that fit together nicely and reasonable abstraction for constructing your own.

jes5199 14y ago

A symptom of this: we have Object Oriented languages that can't produce UI elements that are objects. And that's because we can't figure out how to let objects live from one web request to another? And that's because despite all the new database paradigms, nobody has made a widget-object model that can be saved to the database and reloaded transparently, and that's because our models of serializability of objects are brittle and unsafe (see the recent YAML bugs), and that's because we have no good systems for seamlessly migrating data structures from one version to another

Zak 14y ago
Objects do too much to live in a heterogeneous world. We'd do better serializing maps (JSON is popular, of course, but EDN is better) and operating on them using generic functions rather than trying to bind functionality to data. It's easy enough to serialize the properties of a UI widget when the functionality is data-driven and lives elsewhere.
- jes5199 14y ago
  I think you're probably right? I mean, with the tools available in 2013, I certainly agree that the Clojure way is the least crazy. But I miss some OOP stuff when I'm doing that - like, I kinda like the organizational qualities of OOP; lots of the time I wish I had ruby-style polymorphism (on immutable structures?) instead of having to put all the logic in one function. Maybe that means I should just learn how to use defprotocol. But I guess that still doesn't give you an event model - what's the EDN equivalent of onClick ?
  - Zak 14y ago
    You should learn how to use records, protocols and hierarchies if you want to organize things that way in Clojure. You'll have to be a bit more ad-hoc about the same kinds of things when you're sending them to Javascript or storing them in a database.