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by jrm4 941 days ago
So, I literally teach all of this, and I think the biggest thing to get people to understand is that -- the stack you use right now is a product of evolution, not intelligent design.

It's a minimum of THREE languages to get anything going using the presently most popular programming language; and that includes the stupid fights over whether all three of those are ACKSHUALLY languages.

The environment feels almost hostile to onboarding by design, so you have to STRONGLY distinguish theory from practice.
1 comments
paulddraper 941 days ago
Though that's not unique to the web.

Many UI platforms have multiple languages, e.g. XAML.

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jrm4 941 days ago
Sure, but overwhelmingly "the web" is what people are interested in -- in a way, it's more of a default "operating system" than most operating systems.
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paulddraper 941 days ago
Right, I'm suggesting that using multiple languages is not a mistake or idiosyncracy in the web platform.
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jrm4 941 days ago
But it really is in practice?

As in, if you could design "programming on the web" from the ground up, I'm going to guess you wouldn't base it on technology designed to make reading on the web a look little more like a newspaper plus hyperlinks, and then yet another language that sort of does the same thing but...more, and visually oriented -- before you even get to, and not strongly integrated with, real programming logic?

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paulddraper 941 days ago
If my goal is a platform for both static documents and interactive applications...

I would design it very similarly. Yes, there would be a lot of 20/20 hindsight improvements, fewer WTFs, but the overall structure would be similar.

And you?

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