[davidw]

I'm arguing that languages that are currently used and honed for this type of programming are going to be difficult to beat by an order of magnitude. I said that you could lose a lot by using something that's just plain wrong. In other words, it's very difficult to go faster than Lance Armstrong on a bike, but pretty easy to go a lot slower.

Perhaps there is some room for radically new implementations; something along the lines of Erlang, which makes it possible to do what is quite difficult with other languages.

I think there is more room in frameworks for existing languages, but still, an order of magnitude seems quite dubious to me.

I'm actually not at all negative about new languages (I hack on a simple one myself), startups just don't strike me as the place for them. What they're doing does look cool, but what happens when you need to process an image, or send email, or talk to a different database, or deal with any of the other various things that are often covered by language extensions? Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript.

[raganwald]

Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript

Did you see the bit where they can drop into raw Javascript at will?

[davidw]

It seems to me that the core concept here is the declarative nature of the framework, and the logic that ties things together that comes from the compiler. On one side, it has to spit out Javascript, so perhaps it would have made sense just to do the whole thing as a hack/extension/whatever to Javascript?

I guess without actually seeing the code behind it, it's difficult to really say with certainty.