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Connecting The Dots
It seems worthwhile to connect a few discussions we had recently, and perhaps put them in prespective.
Web programming is becoming more and more important, and many feel there's room for better programming language support for the style of programming is entails. One approach is, of course, to design dedicated (i.e., domain specific) programing languages, such as Links. The other approach is to build application frameworks, but this isn't as easy as it might sound, and depends on the underlying language features, for example continuations (continuations and web programming were discussed here many times). Ajax style web applications may require multi-language programming, and pose their own set of software engineering difficulties. The Ruby on Rails framework (tutorial) supposedly handles Ajax very nicely, and is causing some developers to move in the direction of Ruby. Libraries and framework often have this effect, and influence language popularity more than fundamental language features. This is quite reasonable since, as we see repeatedly, it is quite difficult to appreciate a language by evaluating language features in isolation. It might be helpful to consider what Ian had to say regarding Ruby on Rails as opposed to Python web frameworks. I don't think the important issue at the moment is to decide which language is best. I think it is more important to identify the trends and establish if language design can help improve the state of the art, and if so where. Personally, I think the answer is yes, and I mentioned some areas of opportunity before, but I'd be interested in hearing what others think. |
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