On 01/12/2012 04:53 PM, Erik Falor wrote:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 08:17:06PM +0100, Marc Weber wrote:
I don't want to offend anybody. Just trying to understand whether
having JS support would change anything. So please consider this thread
as being a test whether such a change would pay off in the long run for
the community.
I'm getting lost in this discussion. Are we discussing the addition
of a JavaScript interface, or the wholesale replacement of VimL with
JavaScript?
Clearly there is a lot of push-back to the idea of replacing VimL with
another language. Let me be so bold as to venture to explain why that
is.
There are two components to what we know of as VimL: Ex commands and
expressions (please correct me if I'm wrong about this).
Why are ex commands a part of VimL? They're just user commands.
Sure they can be used directly from VimL but so can normal commands,
and they require an extra keyword only because ex commands are
more often used in VimL.
VimL is user functions, data structures, flow control commands, and
standard library functions. That's what the question is - make
some other language the default, standard, included language
and keep VimL for backwards compatibility for 8 or 10 years
(or more)?
VimL is a domain-specific language in that it is tailored to the
runtime environment inside a text editor.
JavaScript is a domain-specific language in that it is tailored to the
runtime environment inside a web browser.
I don't like JavaScript, but it's light years more powerful than
VimL. JavaScript is a real language that happened to be used
in a domain-specific way, and happened to have more warts than
ruby and python, for historical reasons, but otherwise it's much
better compared to ruby/python/perl than to VimL. I guess it also
doesn't have a mature, standard library, so that's another thing
against it.
JavaScript was created by a web browser company to be used within
their web browsers. Think about it: before the advent of Node.js,
would anybody take you seriously if you suggested using JavaScript
outside a web browser?
Yes, people talked about using JavaScript as a general purpose
language for a very long time. The main issue, I feel, is that
other languages work rather well and while some prefer javascript,
many prefer other languages, even if javascript were to be standardized,
got a large standard library and so on.
If the expression language were changed to Perl, you'd piss off all of
the Python and Ruby people. If it were Ruby, you'd piss off the
Pythonistas and Perlers.
Not true at all, anything would be much better than VimL. I happen
to use Python and it would be nice if it was picked for Vim, but
either python, ruby or JS or perl would be fine.
-ak
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