[mas644]

I always felt the problem with web programming was not so much the expressiveness of existing languages, but rather the hacked nature of the web and more generally the Internet. We try to patch the stateless nature of the original HTTP protocol with cookies, AJAX, Flash player, Java applets, ActiveX, etc. We scale the net with ugly technologies like NAT and BGP. We hack some security on top with things like SSL. Heck, we can't even get simple web pages to render identically in two different web browsers. Though not practical, there's a lot to be said for a clean slate. I don't think any programming language out there is going to be make web programming easier...you gotta rethink the infrastructure on which your web apps run. Once that happens, writing web apps in a language should be no more difficult than writing a native app with said language.

[sandroyong]

I agree a new infrastructure is needed, and a clean slate might not be such a bad idea, especially if it would handle some of the infrastructure-related security and spanning issues for programmers. Such an infrastructure could make it practical to start from a clean slate especially if it could allow us to unravel and discard much of the tangle of complexities that make web programing so much different from native programming. We need to focus on how we use the internet and what we need from it and then revise the current web achitecture to see what's really needed, what's fluff, and what just plain idiocy. Right now, I think we'd find too much fluff and idiocy and not much of what's really needed. This could pave the way for a simplified and more unified architecture that could do what we want and could make it easier to deliver applications across the web. Simplifying that delivery would make it possible to simplify web programming, making it more intuitive and less burdened by security considerations. An altogether different infrastructure would spark new innovations in programming (as others in HN have posted that such innovation has ‘stalled’).

[danssig]

What's ugly about BGP? It's very elegant. Yes, the regex thing is a bit odd but just consider it a DSL.