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But then again, by reading a book (and products/libraries often came with them, no waiting required), you might learn about the whole thing, instead of begging
by mhd 13y ago
But then again, by reading a book (and products/libraries often came with them, no waiting required), you might learn about the whole thing, instead of begging and praying that someone at stackoverflow ran into the same undocumented quasi-feature and hobbled together a jerry-rigged fix.
Compared to CGIs/PHP? Yeah, sure, finally it almost behaves like a normal GUI library. And the way things going, we're probably going to get our Taligent/MFC library soon...
I know, the OP (and Louis CK before him) were mostly arguing against the Nirvana fallacy, where people complain about the status quo as opposed to some mythical idea of perfection. Problem is, I don't see the whole browser stack as superior to previous art (i.e. definitely not mythical). Things like NeWs or Smalltalk.
- cmbaus 13y agoI always thought NeWS was way ahead of its time. The modern web application stack looks a lot like what Gosling did in the 90s, but with PostScript replaced by JavaScript+HTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
- marshray 13y agoI liked the part about "To support user interface widgets, NeWS expanded the original PostScript stack-based language into a complete object oriented (OO) programming style with inheritance."
- mhd 13y agoThe good thing about that was that you could basically do everything in PostScript, in what way does that compare to the modern JavaScript/HTML/CSS+client/server mess? Never mind all the apparently necessary auxiliary languages (templates for HTML, preprocessors for CSS, transpilers for JavaScript). The closest thing would be something that does almost everything in JavaScript and would abstract the HTML/CSS underpinnings away, but that's certainly not the current approach to "proper" web design (ExtJS would come to mind). Honestly, I'd be hard-pressed to find any prior system with that many layers (VBScript?)...