Water, a Newish Web Language Out of MIT 60
jimdesu writes "True to its religion, MIT has reinvented LISP again, this time as a web-programming language called Water.At first blush, it looks rather interesting. It supports hashes, vectors and objects (prototype based) in a manner that makes it look as much like XML as one could possibly conceive. I'm certainly going to play with it. Anyway, the url is at http://www.waterlang.org."
Re:Interesting.. but. (Score:4, Informative)
LISP is over-rated but XML is just fine?
Go Read [mit.edu]
Re:Interesting.. but. (Score:1)
Re:Interesting.. but. (Score:2)
Personally, bit twiddling in C, requires me to use a great deal more keystrokes than in lisp. But, I generally avoid working at the level of abstraction that causes C to be useful.
Re:Interesting.. but. (Score:2)
'jfb
Re:Interesting.. but. (Score:2, Informative)
Amazing repost. Well thought out, with intelligence flowing from every letter.
If you were responding to my comment on Mumps, I would hope that you have at least seen the language. It was a decent language for the needs of its time (circa 1966 if memory serves), however the syntax of the language has led to decades of cryptic, obfuscated language. The only data type of the language is the string, which endows the language with considerable power for database applications. However, the language syntax, coupled with its interpreted heritage, encourages incredibly cryptic code. My employer has well over thirty years of Mumps code driving their database product, and the language's problems have lead to no end of headaches.
If, however, your comment was in response to my comment on the syntax of Water, in my view the language forces the programmer to write considerably more code to do the same job as other languages. In my view, this is not a step forward. A good, well designed language, should work to improve on the effort of previous languages without forgetting the lessons learned from them. This language does not, in my opinion, do so.
This was an interesting effort, particularly given the bifurcation of languages we have seen for internet development. However, they would have paid themselves signficant dividends by considering another path that did not tie their syntax to the SGML heritage. It was good for data presentation, but in my experience it does not expand well to solve other problems.
I stand by my comment on the readability of Water code and the maintenance issues of the language. I work with a number of programmers whose job security is derived from the poor quality code they have produced. It is bad enough that we have professional C++ programmers who are allowed (by their employers) to produce almost entirely unmaintainable code. The situation is compounded by creating a language that serves to make this easier.
First Post (Score:3, Funny)
Re: First Post (Score:3, Funny)
> thing.<set message="hello world">
Wouldn't a real OO language require sending a hello message to an object named world ?
Re: First Post (Score:1)
Re: First Post (Score:1)
VB (Score:1, Funny)
The goal of Water is to be easier to learn than Visual Basic
I stopped reading right there.
Re:VB (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:VB (Score:2)
Re:VB (Score:2)
People who really understand a language could write it from scratch if they had to.
Yes, but is this necessarily the fastest way to get the job out the door, or the best way to make code maintainable once the guy who invented the language has fallen under a bus?
I've done a fair bit of programming in BASIC and Lisp, and there's no doubt in my mind that Lisp is the language of the Gods, but, for a lot of web applications, you don't need tail recursion or lexical scoping, you just need something that works, and which has a decent set of libraries to do all the hard work for you. Personally, I find that Perl usually does the job quite nicely: it has a lot of lisp-like features for when you need them, but if all you want is a list of instructions it does that too, and it is blindingly fast for everything except for intensive number crunching. If the OO layer wasn't so thin as to be transparent it would be pretty close to the perfect web language in my book.
Bad memories (Score:1)
I have some very bad memories of trying to write a "meta-circular evaluator" in scheme.
As I used to say: Any language that's a dialect of a speech impediment should simply be avoided.
Sounds good. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've done it all: PHP ASP Javascript, Java applets, mod_perl and the likes. I am still open to possibly a new lang that beats em all. Something thats
(1) Open
(2) Open source
(3) Works for LOTS of databasen IMAP SSL LDAP etc
(4) Flexible
(5) Compilable on everything
(6) plugs nicely into apache
(7) Possibly compiles
(8) Supports languages (i18)
(9) Doesnt blindly try to follow C++
(10) Is not so concept-based that its workings cannot be understood.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:1)
> I am still open to possibly a new lang that beats em all. Something thats
(1) Open
(2) Open source
(3) Works for LOTS of databasen IMAP SSL LDAP etc
(4) Flexible
(5) Compilable on everything
(6) plugs nicely into apache
(7) Possibly compiles
(8) Supports languages (i18)
(9) Doesnt blindly try to follow C++
(10) Is not so concept-based that its workings cannot be understood.
(11) Buzzword compliant
(12)
(13) Profit!
Re:Sounds good. (Score:2, Informative)
Try Python [python.org].
Re:Sounds good. (Score:1)
Java, Python, Perl and lots of other languages fit the bill quite nicely.
By the way, SSL is a API and protocol for public key encryption, hence 'Secure Socket Layer' - not a database. Use of SSL is the job of the webserver, and has absolutely nothing to do with the language that the web application was written in.
I suppose IMAP could possibly be called a database interface language, because a mail server vaguely resembles one - but that's a stretch.
So what on earth are you talking about?
Not to bash the language, as I really haven't taken a good look at it, but their example comparing Java servlets with Water was ridiculous. You cannot make a fair, honest or remotely reasonable comparison of languages on such a small scale, and use "this only took numer of lines as opposed to !"
Disclaimer: I have gotten paid for JSP/servlet development.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:2)
I meant I used those in the languages. Anyone can do echo 2+2 in any language, implementing them in SSL+DB+IMAP webservers and between each other from different hosts is on a different complication level.
I've used these languages in many scenarios and none can be called 'universal', although perl comes close.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:1)
How do you implement a language in SSL? IMAP? or a DB?
You mean you've used the SSL libraries? Or you just configured your HTTP server to run an HTTPS service?
Interesting combinations of programming languages (Score:5, Funny)
Water + Java = Kaffe
Would a very large program written in Water be called Sea? Get it? Sea? C?
Talk about diving into some Water programming. If you are under a lot of water programming, would you be drowning with work?
Gator based on Ada and Water = Gatorada
I'll shut up now.
Re:Interesting combinations of programming languag (Score:1)
> Water + PROLOG = Waterlog
> Water + Java = Kaffe
Water + BASIC = pottie training language.
Water + Visual BASIC -- let's not go there, OK?
mod down... (Score:1, Funny)
Here is Oleg's take on it (Score:4, Interesting)
* Sharpening the parentheses: bringing Lisp ideas to programming the Web
Henry Lieberman of MIT Multimedia Lab.
Henry Lieberman said that Lisp is indeed good for web
programming, but people seem to prefer sharp parentheses () to round
ones. If you can use Lisp, you should -- he said, -- but sometimes,
you're constrained: you have to accept legacy XML documents and XSLT
stylesheets. His solution: design a programming language with an XML
syntax. He went on to describe a programming language,
. As it turns out, XML syntax is indeed
unsuitable for a programming language. So, the Language 'Water' uses
some kind of a simplified XML syntax. The language is not Lisp either
-- neither in notation (which is infix), nor in semantics. It looks a
lot like a Javascript. Programs in the Water language can run either
on a server, or on the client, in a browser plug-in.
This talk left several people puzzled: at first the author
said he wanted to use XML because it's popular, and Lisp because it's
a good language. He ended up using neither. BTW, Water requires a
license for a commercial use. I drew two conclusions: first, we need
to advertise SXML better. SXML can do everything Water does -- and can
do more and better. I also need to look up Henry Lieberman's slides,
which say "Web community blew the web programming" and "web
programming collapses under its own weight." Imagine a slide: Henry
Lieberman, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee, says: "Web programming is
collapsing under its own weight." We need to save it.
I wanted to talk with Henry Lieberman and point out that there
is another way to assure interoperability with the XML culture. Rather
than translating Lisp to XML, we can translate XML and XML tools into
Lisp. That's what the SXML talk was all about. I didn't catch him. The
conference schedule didn't leave much time for discussions. Anyway,
SXML ideas are timely, we are not doing worse than other people -- and
perhaps better.
My overall impression from that talk is disappointment: I
thought people at MIT media lab can design better languages than I do.
Re:Here is Oleg's take on it + Troll (Score:4, Interesting)
stylesheets"
When did XML become a 'legacy' language?
Wow, the 2nd millenium sure is moving fast!
XML/SGML legacy (Score:1)
That's the way it seems to me too. XML is a revision of SGML. Together they are widely used, and ancient in web terms, in that SGML predates the web.
SGML can also be seen as a big step back from Lisp's s-expressions. I imagine that if sexps had used angle brackets from the start -- instead of parentheses, which clash with the ordinary use of parentheses in plain text, and are also harder to type -- Lisp-like languages would be more widely used for structured text processing.
Perhaps they would have led to an earlier web. Lisp was developed in the late 1950s.
Re:Here is Oleg's take on it + Troll (Score:2)
Wow, the 2nd millenium sure is moving fast!
No, it's just that its regression is beginning to slow down.
Highly Biased Examples? (Score:4, Insightful)
For those of you who didn't read the document, "The task is to create a new HTML tag with a single parameter, message, and use the tag from an HTML page to insert the chunk of HTML"
Essentially what they want to do is define a new html tag and have it spit out a message. Not surprisingly, this is exactly how water seems to worry. According to their findings, this task can be completed in a single 7 line file in water, while using JSP it requires 4 files, 65 lines of code and 4 languages! While I'm not experienced with JSP, from looking at the code not only do they seem to be using a hugely complex solution for a simple problem, but a lot of unnecessary code as well. This doesn't even take into account the fact that they are counting blank lines as lines of code, and are putting every single opening and closing curly bracket on iits own line!
I can't speak for the rest of you, but I would be much more interested in seeing some comparative examples which try to solve a problem in the manner best suited to each language. This nonsense of implementing a single highly specific and language biased solution to a very simple task just doesn't cut it.
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:5, Insightful)
My impression is that the Water vs. JSP example
is a poor one because JSP is designed for a
different scale of complexity and level of control.
The overhead for JSP programming is quite large,
but as a result of buying into it's infrastructure,
you get a lot of library support. That makes it
suitable for large-scale development, where functional
components need to be finely factored and real-world
issues like deployment methods and human resource
application come into play. It's also a poor
example for showing the benefits of Water (of which
I admit ignorance) because it makes Water look
like a toy.
Think about a Hello, World program.
Basic:
Print "Hello, World!"
C:
#include
int main (int * ac, char ** av) {
printf("Hello, World!\n");
}
Java:
import java.lang.*;
package org.slashdot.examples;
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
System.exit(0);
}
}
Each of these is increasingly verbose and complex,
yet who would argue that it was more complicated
and difficult to develop and maintain a typical
3-tier application in Java than in Basic?
Of course the cost of entry is not a definitive
indicator of the leverage offered by a platform!
(format t "Hello, World!%n")
is pretty straightforward, but CommonLISP is a
very sophisticated and highly leveragable
environment. It may well be that Water has
inherited a similar scalability, but the example
fails to show this, by virtue of its triviality.
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
Where did you come up with those "Hello World"-Samples?
import java.lang.*;
// no need to import java.lang.*. If you do you would have to do it you should
package org.slashdot.examples;
//
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
System.exit(0);
// as is the call to System.exit.
}
}
While at the same time, your C code is incorrectly abbreviated.
#include
// you're not including anything with the above, while you would actually need to include:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int * ac, char ** av) {
printf("Hello, World!\n");
// calling the exit function on success is much more common in C than in Java, and considered good style:
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
Leaving out the comments I come to 124 chars for the c programm and 112 for java. The java example is certainly less complex when you leave out all the confisuing crap you threw in. Try to explain: (int * ac, char ** av) in 100 words or less!
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:1)
av is an array of strings which holds your arguments. ac is the count of arguments passed to the
program. av[0] is the program name that was ran. av[1] is the first argument.
Do I win a prize?
Anyway, ac shouldn't be a pointer to an int - it should be an int, eg: int main(int ac, char **argv)
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
Well your answer is correct, so you get a smiley. Then again, I didn't ask what those meant in the context of the main function... That's not the point, though.
A thing to explain to somebody who doesn't know C anyway would be, e.g. what's **?
Those things are clear to somebody who knows them, but they're not intuitive. Finally, the post was a rebuke of the parent that claimed (String [] args) is more complicated and verbose than (int * ac, char ** av)
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
For a beginners example, you don't need to.
int main(void) works just as well. Also removes some of the charcount.
the exit(EXIT_SUCCESS), though correct in form, is a bit verbose for something that you use as a code example, and can just be exit(0) especially since you use the equivalent System.exit(0) in Java.
If you wanted it real slim, though wrong, you could withhold the #include's. You'd get warnings on compile, but it would link fine. You could also scotch the exit(), though without it you'd get undefined behavior. Some systems would be OK and just give unknown exit values to the shell, some might have problems. Most DOS code defines main as void main(...)
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
I don't think ISO C guarantees that zero will be regarded as a successful termination (much less that EXIT_SUCCESS equals zero), though POSIX probably does.
I'd argue that calling System.exit is a Really Bad Idea unless you are absolutely certain you are the only app. One of the design goals of Java was to confine untrusted code without relying on process boundaries, which means an ideal system would run just one JVM for all users with an elaborate security policy.
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
Re:Highly Biased Examples? (Score:2)
Still think zope has more potential (Score:3, Insightful)
Zope Page Templates [zope.org] is the fisrt solution I've seen so far which really separates content and code, while enabling editing of dynamic templates in a regular html editor...
XML syntax? (Score:4, Insightful)
true.<and false/> />
<thing foo=5/>.<equal <thing foo=5/>
object.<get key lookup=false if_missing='return' default=false/>
I've seen a language that works with XML as a first-class data structure, but it had a normal C-like syntax, say
x = <foo bar="3"/>;
if (x.bar == 3) {...};
IMHO the latter makes much more sense - you can work with XML and you don't have to learn a whole new LISPy hybrid syntax.
Re:XML syntax? (Score:2)
What I can't work out is why anyone would want to program (as opposed to handling data) in a language that looks anything like XML. XML is designed first and foremost to be written and read by computers. Sure, it is also supposed to be possible to eyeball it, but the sheer verbosity of XML makes trying to work out what is going on in any non-trivial case a major test for (human) memory. I've always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good language is that it lets you do the common things in the shortest possible amount of lines, and lets you see the overall structure without wading through all the detail.
Re:XML syntax? (Score:2)
Well (Score:2)
but with a different syntax, an not just another "language" with a half-assed S-exps
based syntax, like XML
[/WARNING]
Someone was talking about "Sharpening the Parenthesis" at his past International Lisp
Conference. If this isn't the same guy, I guess they beat him to it.
But then, couldn't these Water guys just embed a free Common Lisp (specially ECL)* or any
of the gazillion scheme kernels (specially scheme48) into their web platforms and still
have the same effect (plus the ability to work with a real language, specially in the case
of Common Lisp were one has macro, an excellent objec t system (CLOS + Meta Object Protocol)
and rich builtin datastructures?
--
* ECL is under a BSD like system and the VERY powerful CMUCL is public domain!!!
Not again!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually programming in XML takes away the clarity of expression that you would ideally have in a programming language - it is not terse, and the syntax is way too noisy. Take a look at ruby, if you are at all interested in a terse language, where it is easy to write code that actually communicate intent.
This language is UGLY (Score:2, Interesting)
Warning! (Score:3, Funny)
You were warned.
Comments from the co-author of Water (Score:2, Informative)
respond to any questions. I've tried to
summarize the questions so far and give a
response to each one.
1. XML syntax is cumbersome, verbose, and should
not be used for a programming language.
MP: Agreed. That is why we had to invent
ConciseXML which makes XML as concise
as most languages based on Algol/C syntax.
It supports arguments by position, optional
ending tags, and non-string attributes.
2. Water does not use XML syntax
MP: Yes and no. It is true that most examples
are shown in the ConciseXML syntax, but
every ConciseXML expression could be written
in valid XML 1.0 -- it is just be more
verbose. In fact, ConciseXML supports the
mixing of XML 1.0 and concise forms in the
same document/program.
Every XHTML page on the Web is a valid Water
data structure.
3. Water co-mingles content and logic
MP: Most technologies either force you to separate
content and logic (which can get cumbersome),
or they co-mingle it (which is often easier,
but leads to a mess). Water is the first
language (that I know of) which supports both
-- the decision is up to the architect/programmer.
I believe Water is the first programming language
that makes it possible to work with both
markup and code without any barriers between
the two.
4. The comparison of Water to JSP was not
valid.
MP: You can never win when picking an example. I
found a book on JSP and used one of their
advanced examples. Because I wrote that
article, most people (unfortunately) assume
that Water is competing with JSP. My intention
was to show that a general-purpose language
(Water) can be simpler than a special-purpose
language (JSP). My new book has a bunch more
examples.
5. Who cares if "Hello World" example are simple,
how does it handle real complexity?
MP: Water code often looks simple, but the
designers of Water implemented languages
such as Common Lisp, Scheme, amd Dylan.
We have designed Water to have the power
of Lisp, but easier than Basic to start
using. For example, you can just type
in any HTML and it will run.
6. Lisp is very powerful (but didn't win)
MP: Agreed. One of the problems of Lisp was
that it was difficult for developers to
get to that power. Often first impressions
when looking at a piece of code are often
the basis for whether people like the language.
7. Why didn't Water use Scheme or Lisp as
the foundation?
MP: Neither Scheme nor Lisp had an XML syntax
that made it possible to mix content and code.
Also, I had a hard time learning Scheme and Lisp
at MIT, and we wanted to make Water much more
approachable. The underlying implementation of
Water has a lot of similarities to a Scheme or
Lisp interpreter.
8. Water is not free and therefore will lose.
MP: There is certainly a tension between making
a viable business and giving everything away
for free. Java was "free" from Sun, but other
vendors sold runtime licenses (J2EE) for
thousands of dollars per CPU for commerical
purposes. If a company can't make money by
selling a product, then the product and company
will likely die in the long term
because they can not afford to invest money into
product development.
Clear Methods intend to give a lot of Water
away for free, but charge money when people
get commerical value from it.
The pricing is meant to be very reasonable.
Re:Comments from the co-author of Water (Score:1)
Consulting Services
Architect: $3,000 per day
Programmer: $1,500 per day
Jumpstart Workshop: $20,000 for one-week, up to 6 developers
and the other ways [waterlang.org] money is to be made ($100,000 for joining a committee!!!), I get the feeling that you guys are out to line your pockets by faking out stupid corporations who will waste gazillions on anything they don't understand. I get that curl [curl.com] feeling...
Good luck though since you will be competing with Sun and Microsoft.
I leave this bit to ponder from http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html [paulgraham.com]:
"If you look at the history of programming languages, a lot of the best ones were languages designed for their own authors to use, and a lot of the worst ones were designed for other people to use.
When languages are designed for other people, it's always a specific group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer. So you get a language that talks down to you. Cobol is the most extreme case, but a lot of languages are pervaded by this spirit.
It has nothing to do with how abstract the language is. C is pretty low-level, but it was designed for its authors to use, and that's why hackers like it.
The argument for designing languages for bad programmers is that there are more bad programmers than good programmers. That may be so. But those few good programmers write a disproportionately large percentage of the software.
I'm interested in the question, how do you design a language that the very best hackers will like? I happen to think this is identical to the question, how do you design a good programming language?, but even if it isn't, it is at least an interesting question. "
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