[Openmcl-devel] upcoming 1.6 release

[Jon Anthony]

On Sun, 2010-10-24 at 11:55 -0600, Alexander Repenning wrote:
> I suggest to Clozure as well as the CCL community to have a good look
> at the recent developments of JavaScript. Particularly:

Having been using JS for a while now (as part of a couple projects) I
would agree that as a language it is rather better (and more
interesting) than a lot of other so called "new languages".  It also has
an even more remarkable aspect: it is typically fun.  It would  be a
very nice alternative to Java if it had a more robust industrial base.


> - Debugging environment: Even Safari has a fine REPL, inspector, break

I use Firefox with Firebug.  That's pretty nice, but I wouldn't rave
about it at the level you do here.  The debugger is only usable and as
an full IDE, it falls down by not having an editor aspect that has much
going for it.  Maybe Safari is better.


> - Performance: By now you may say, OK, that is nice but JavaScript 

Being prototype based, I think the "object model" is actually a lot more
interesting than most things.  It's very flexible and dynamic (just look
at what the Prototype folks have done with it.  Speaking of which, you
really need a library/framework like that to smooth over all the
inconsistencies, oddities, and such).  Performance is pretty typical of
such things - it's not a barn burner but it isn't exactly dead slow
either (you want to whine about slow, use Ruby.  Pre 1.9 in particular
was mind numbing).  Of course this really depends on the interpreter and
maybe Safari's is rather better than Firefox.


> Concretely: I think everybody should have a peek at these new browser
> based IDEs. They are pretty impressive. Why not get inspired in terms
> of user interface ideas and build some of them into the next version
> of the Cocoa-based CCL IDE?

Actually, I think a combo of Prototype+Scriptaculous and one of the
"window" libs could be used to build a pretty cool browser based IDE
(using JSON as data xfer) to a variety of things (in particular Lisp).
I did a variant of this once using Java Applets, but I think JS has much
more potential here.  And it looks a _lot_ better.

/Jon


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> Alex 
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> Prof. Alexander Repenning
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> University of Colorado
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> Computer Science Department
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> Boulder, CO 80309-430
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> vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf
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