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One of the highlights for me at JAOO Sydney 2009 was Dave Thomas’ talk on Cloud computing. Among other things, he talked about the vast dinosaur swamp of OO middleware that Java developers will be having fun maintaining for the next thirty years.
As somebody whose programming time is mostly either UI related in JavaScript or hobby coding in whatever takes my fancy in a given week (this week it’s factor) I was in a good position to laugh in a “it’s funny because it’s not happening to me” way at the humorous insights from Dave, the self confessed former Pied Piper of Objects. Actually, I found it especially amusing because my recollection of computer science at university in the late 90’s was that almost every student at the time was begging, demanding, wailing and gnashing their teeth… to be trained as a member of this army of average Java middleware programmers.
Of course, opting to code UI in JavaScript long ago revoked my membership to the fraternity of real programmers so my hyperbole on these things can freely be dismissed as nonsense by that part of the world shepherding business objects for a living.
I was raised on objects. I like objects. I do not like what we did with them.
In particular, I don’t like that I can sit in a meeting of non-programmers who once walked past a Computer Science 101 lecture and hear somebody saying that “we should take an object-oriented approach” to the problem.
I don’t like that anybody doing architecture ever talked in terms of UML class diagrams where all the business objects were drawn and detailed and then all the messages, you know the actual stuff going on was reduced to zero. It’s all interface, all objects and nothing happening. That’s not designing a living system for code, it’s designing a pyramid to bury people in.
All objects with no messages, no configurability, no data. Everything else got moved or obliterated until finally, finally when somebody turned around and realised “Hey, we need ways to do a bunch of this other stuff” the answer that came forth was XML. So now there’s this whole universe of people programming all the important parts of their software in XML. I don’t care to take a guess at how that is going to work out.
Of course, that was all too hard for many people and instead of following the musical pipe they went off to use PHP, broke every single principle of good, bad and ugly software design - including some that weren’t invented yet, and still managed to get things done. That said, I’ve done enough work with things such as the Wordpress template system to be reasonably confident that something has gone horribly awry and that there’s a good chance that a whole community of programmers will also be keeping themselves in jobs maintaining the mess they’ve created in PHP.
Back to JAOO though, it was good to see a strong representation for dynamic languages, DSL’s, functional programming and on top of all that, it was good to hear all types of people with a good sense of history and architects talking about service oriented architectures and composition.
Now, at this point I would assume that any lispers still paying attention to current trends can only be wondering why it took so many dances around the prickly-pear tree before more people started to “get it.” The lispers may have questions such as “Did it really take fifty years for lambda to even start entering mainstream consciousness?” and “Is XML really what you made of s-expressions?” and those would be just warm up questions… what happened?
The shift to DSL’s is encouraging… I can only hope that this time we can actually get them right as almost everything that has come before has been an abomination. That goes double for most of the 4GL’s around, I’m looking at you CSS. The problem with most 4GL’s is that they were designed to suit the problem, not the people who had to solve the problem. I think one of the big challenges going forward will be how to design languages, or design the space around which languages can develop, that work better for users… while still maintaining conceptual purity and elegance.
The ECMAScript discussion list (es-discuss) has a thread(s) running on future proposals for lambda syntax with several hundred posts. A similar thread on class syntax has, by comparison, gone largely ignored.
Some others have noted the potential significance of this. Does it demonstrate a trend in JavaScript? Is it indicative of where programming languages in general are headed?
As Guy Steele has put it:
A closure is an object that supports exactly one method: “apply”.
On the other hand, there’s this, usually attributed to Norman Adams:
Objects are a poor man’s closures.
Still, there really isn’t that much distance from one to the other… granted, that is relative to context.
From my point of view, classical OO has sometimes trended towards being overbearing, particularly for UI development. This is probably why everybody is excited about finding a more elegant lambda syntax for JavaScript and less interested in class syntax, which simultaneously feels more like bookkeeping and also is likely to have a mental association with an heavy-feeling ontology that many JavaScript coders would want to avoid.
Sun Microsystems have just announced the 1.0 version of JavaFX, one of the main components being JavaFX Script.
Let me get this straight. After twelve years Sun have finally admitted that writing UI’s in Swing blows goats and their solution is to release something that lets you create a swing UI using code that borrows heavily from JavaScript.
What’s it got? First-class functions, declarative syntax, list-comprehensions…
I’m going to repeat the name because I think it bears repeating. JavaFX Script. I guess the only name bad enough was already taken so they threw an FX in the middle.
If it weren’t for my horse… I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.
Here’s a JavaFX Script code sample (excuse the code formatter from getting confused with the indenting):
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.shape.Rectangle;
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
import javafx.scene.shape.Circle;
Stage {
title: "Declaring Is Easy!"
width: 249
height: 251
visible: true
scene: Scene {
content: [
Rectangle {
x: 45
y: 35
width: 150
height: 150
arcWidth: 15
arcHeight: 15
fill: Color.GREEN
},
Circle {
centerX: 118
centerY: 110
radius: 83
fill: Color.WHITE
stroke: Color.RED
}
]
}
}
Looking at it, I don’t think I need to talk about where the inspiration for that comes from. Still… haven’t the GWT proponents been telling everybody for a long time that scripting languages are evil? Will GWT one day allow people to write JavaFX Script and have it compile to JavaScript? I don’t know and honestly I don’t care.
JavaScript is far from perfect but I think the current Ajax “stack” works for (at least) three reasons:
1 - Some of the constraints have, by accident, improved many UI’s. I mentioned that before.
2 - The open web.
3 - JavaScript actually has some features that are really good for creating UI’s. Homoiconicity (to some degree), lambda and a prototypal object oriented system.
JavaScript won’t last forever but I haven’t seen anything yet that is better on those three points.
Update: I notice some people have come here looking for some demistification of this JavaFX error:
com.sun.javafx.runtime.AssignToBoundException: Cannot assign to bound variable
I can’t help you. Hey, at least you’re not looking at this compile error huh?
Expected type int * int -> int, got type int * (int -> int)
