Sweet!
I did fail to describe what motivated the conversation to begin with:
writing sophisticated client/server/peer applications in team
programming projects.
Ones you write both the client, server and communication code. Not
"pick a CMS and use it". Something big. And new. And who's "Hello
World" really could span the globe. And one who's deployment was
*really* simple .. in this case one URL.
Most of us do not do this sort of thing. We build a core technology
project for a minimum of 5 years in a solid language: C/C++/Java/...
Or we build shorter projects like web sites using a CMS, mainly server
side, matching our skills or our client requirements, hopefully both.
But when you really have to do something new as Steve and I did
recently which mixed Google App Engine, Google Data Store, Google
Maps, team SVN usage, JavaScript, XML/Ajax, Python, lat/lng to/from
street addresses, HTML/CSS, DOM parsing, Cloud computing, ... you
start to re-think your options.
One huge and humbling surprise: how difficult it is to use two
different languages (Python and Javascript) in equal measure on a
single project. I had prided myself on being able to use a lot of
different languages .. but I never did so on one project.
This is important for the sfComplex, where we are striving to build a
project space, doing many sophisticated team projects blending
science, tech, visualization, client/server/peer computing. This is
harder than we had thought.
Hence the interest in a way to simplify, yet remain sophisticated.
May fail, due to all the below. But maybe not.
-- Owen
On Jul 17, 2009, at 10:04 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
Ooh! My kind of a comment. Gloomy, pessimistic, dark.
I like it!
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Dale Schumacher <[email protected]
> wrote:
Build not your house on sand.
Regrettably, I fear it is far too late for that advice.
As Crockford himself writes, there were a lot of poor implementation
decisions made in the design of JavaScript. And there are a lot of
people who've written code that relies on what he called the "Awful
Parts" and the "Bad Parts".
JavaScript and its derivatives are certainly important, and increasing
popular, technologies. And it's ubiquitous availability has
definitely led me to use it, for web design, but also for prototyping
other ideas. Ultimately, I expect, its design flaws will lead to a
collapse, forcing us to move on to yet another platform.
Enjoy the ride.
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Owen Densmore<[email protected]>
wrote:
> At Friam today we discussed the latest buzz about javascript and
it's
> renaissance in the computing world.
--- lots of excellent information removed. see the original thread for
details ---
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