10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting 190
snydeq writes "InfoWorld examines the platforms and passions underlying today's popular dynamic languages, and though JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, and other scripting tools are fast achieving the critical mass necessary to flourish into the future, 10 forces in particular appear to be driving the evolution of this development domain. From the cooption of successful ideas across languages, to the infusion of application development into applications that are fast evolving beyond their traditional purpose, to the rise of frameworks, the cloud, and amateur code enablers, each will have a profound effect on the future of today's dynamic development tools."
Re:10 forces? (Score:2, Informative)
A quick skim over the article reveals that these ten "forces" are just some common platitudes. The article itself is not that meaningful.
Re:Fast javascript (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript [wikipedia.org]
I don't know if any of those are good, but it's a start.
Clueless. (Score:5, Informative)
Larry Wall nabbed Python's object system when he created Perl...
Erm, WTF? Perl was released in 1987; Python was 1991.
Re:Clueless. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:this guy didn't do any research (Score:4, Informative)
From Larry Wall's 2007 State of the Onion: [perl.com]
Re:10 forces? (Score:4, Informative)
It was a perfectly good joke, until you came and spoiled it!
Re:Fast javascript (Score:5, Informative)
The safari javascript engine is called SquirrelFish (And there's also SquirrelFish Extreme, which compiles javascript into machine code, with predictable speed increases.) and it is open-source as it's part of webkit.
http://webkit.org/ [webkit.org]
Re:Clueless. (Score:5, Informative)
'I assume they mean some flavor of Perl 5, since the Perl didn't have objects prior to Perl 5. And Perl 5 released several years after Python.'
Indeed. According to Larry:
'After Tcl came Python, which in Guido's mind was inspired positively by ABC, but in the Python community's mind was inspired negatively by Perl. I'm not terribly qualified to talk about Python however. I don't really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.'
Re:Computer languages evolve like natural language (Score:5, Informative)
"It wasn't until the Europeans discovered Sanskrit in the 18th century until European languages had any formal grammar."
Well, sure... It's only that the first printed greek grammar is from 1453; the first modern grammar, the Spanish one from Nebrija, dates from 1492; the first Italian one, that of Trissino, is from 1529, the Portuguesse one from Fernando de Oliveira is from 1536 and the French one from Louis Meigret was published on 1550.
Re:Fast javascript (Score:3, Informative)
Ruby on Rails' RJS templates is exactly that. You write Ruby that is translated into Javascript calls. I've written a number of Javascript-driven Ruby on Rails apps without ever having written a single line of actual Javascript. You get a "page" object which represents the DOM, simple as can be.
http://www.google.com/search?q=rjs+templates [google.com]
Re:the inevitability of an uber-scripting language (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Computer languages evolve like natural language (Score:3, Informative)
PHP is no more like a natural human language than any other programming language. Did you never learn about the Chomsky hierarchy in your computer science classes? All programming languages are formal languages as they are at least regular languages. However it is not known whether human natural languages (or any other conceivably similar natural language) are entirely translatable to any formal language. The two cannot be assumed to be comparable until this can be proven, and as far as linguistics goes we're a long way from being able to even *nonmathematically* describe a single natural language, much less prove compatibility with formal languages. Hell, in linguistics we're not even sure what words even *are*, much less how to completely define the set of them.
As for your other commentary, you're talking complete and unfounded nonsense.
Re:Fast javascript (Score:3, Informative)
Rhino [mozilla.org]
Attila Szegedi [szegedi.org]