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'why should it?' because VBA feels horribly wrong to write, at the opposite of intuition. One can say that this is just my own opinion, but i would be curious t

by zrz 13y ago

'why should it?' because VBA feels horribly wrong to write, at the opposite of intuition. One can say that this is just my own opinion, but i would be curious to talk to somebody that thinks 'it's like VBA reads my mind!'. When I I switched to coffeescript and less, I wasn't even unsatisfied with js and CSS. But, writing it, I always think they took productivity a step forward. If you can avoid writing things that are implicit, it lowers the probability of faulty code. it saves you time and pain. that is just smart. You mention dlls, C#, PyPy ... those are big tools for writing whole projects. They implicitly request the use of an IDE for the compilation/linking steps. This is definitely not the solution i,'m looking for.

dalke 13y ago
I can't reconcile "it's like VBA reads my mind" with the goal, since it wouldn't be VBA; it would be another language which compiles to VBA. CoffeeScript isn't "Javascript that reads your mind." Scala isn't "Java that reads your mind." CoffeeScript had some difficulties, for that matter. It wasn't until CoffeeScript 1.6.1 that there was a way, in collaboration with browsers which support source maps, to get error line numbers relative to the CoffeeScript source instead of the intermediate Javascript. Any language which isn't VB but which compiles to VB will have the same problems - how do you report report run-time errors in a way that your users can understand them? There's similar problems with debugging. How do you step through your source? How do you inspect intermediate values? These are things that VBA supports, but your language won't be able to support. You might end up with a great language design that ends up taking more time to implement in because it isn't debuggable. Regarding PyPy, the reason I mentioned it was in context of "I actually would be interested to know about the state of the art [in designing high level language that transpiles to another], any resources are very welcome." PyPy is state of the art for that, if you want a JIT.
- zrz 13y ago
  Do you mean that PyPy is a state of the art transpiled language? Actually I was looking for state of the art tools that helps designing/implementing languages. I have come across CoffeeScript's annotated source, on their website, and I'm definitely going to digg deep in this documentation. I also might get more information on the difficulties that appeared at the creation of CoffeeScript, as you say. Although, I am thinking about a language that compiles to VBA, meaning it produces visible VBA, and that VBA would be debuggable I guess.
  - dalke 13y ago
    I mean that RPython toolchain of PyPy is a language implementation platform. It has multiple back ends. The most common is x86, but one of the more experimental backends is Javascript. There are several languages implemented in PyPy. The most well known is Python, but Ruby, Prolog, and others exist. Thus, PyPy is a transpiler from, say, Python to Javascript, etc. LLVM is another such tool. It supports an asm.js backend, which gives quite good performance in modern Javascript engines. The end result is that you can compile C and other languages into Javascript. See, for example, the Doom port for the browser.

by zrz 13y ago

dalke 13y ago

I can't reconcile "it's like VBA reads my mind" with the goal, since it wouldn't be VBA; it would be another language which compiles to VBA. CoffeeScript isn't "Javascript that reads your mind." Scala isn't "Java that reads your mind." CoffeeScript had some difficulties, for that matter. It wasn't until CoffeeScript 1.6.1 that there was a way, in collaboration with browsers which support source maps, to get error line numbers relative to the CoffeeScript source instead of the intermediate Javascript. Any language which isn't VB but which compiles to VB will have the same problems - how do you report report run-time errors in a way that your users can understand them? There's similar problems with debugging. How do you step through your source? How do you inspect intermediate values? These are things that VBA supports, but your language won't be able to support. You might end up with a great language design that ends up taking more time to implement in because it isn't debuggable. Regarding PyPy, the reason I mentioned it was in context of "I actually would be interested to know about the state of the art [in designing high level language that transpiles to another], any resources are very welcome." PyPy is state of the art for that, if you want a JIT.

zrz 13y ago
Do you mean that PyPy is a state of the art transpiled language? Actually I was looking for state of the art tools that helps designing/implementing languages. I have come across CoffeeScript's annotated source, on their website, and I'm definitely going to digg deep in this documentation. I also might get more information on the difficulties that appeared at the creation of CoffeeScript, as you say. Although, I am thinking about a language that compiles to VBA, meaning it produces visible VBA, and that VBA would be debuggable I guess.
- dalke 13y ago
  I mean that RPython toolchain of PyPy is a language implementation platform. It has multiple back ends. The most common is x86, but one of the more experimental backends is Javascript. There are several languages implemented in PyPy. The most well known is Python, but Ruby, Prolog, and others exist. Thus, PyPy is a transpiler from, say, Python to Javascript, etc. LLVM is another such tool. It supports an asm.js backend, which gives quite good performance in modern Javascript engines. The end result is that you can compile C and other languages into Javascript. See, for example, the Doom port for the browser.