Initially I thought it should also be at least possible, if not trivial to do so in for example Python or Ruby (and of course the article never claims that you can’t do it). But looking more closely I was a bit more skeptical.
Objective-S describes itself as “possibly the first general purpose programming language.”, then compares other languages with this claim to be “actually DSLs for the domain of algorithms”.
And then, you see the language…and it’s…a DSL for writing applications using a native UI framework?
I mean, I don’t think it’s a bad-looking language, it just seems to have a really contradictory statement right in the introduction.
a DSL for writing applications using a native UI framework?
Not exactly sure where you are getting this from. Yes, a bunch of the examples are framework-specific, but of course for something that’s about better ways of gluing together components you need to start with some components. fib(n) doesn’t cut it, that’s algorithmic. Unless you also want to create all the components from scratch, they’ll come from somewhere, but that doesn’t mean the mechanisms are in any way specific to that.
So I guess the question is why the mechanisms also look like they are specific to one UI framework, even though they are not.
The examples were pretty useful in showing me what the language actually was like. I’m glad you included them, because that sentence just totally confused me as to what the actual reasoning for Objective-S was. The introductory paragraph felt super academic, but then looking down I felt like I could see the practicality in the code. I’m not sure you need more/better examples, just a more down-to-earth introduction, showcasing the language’s strengths. After you explained it here I kinda do get what you mean, like those other languages are designed so you can write algorithms, and ergonomically are not truly designed for primarily writing UIs. Yet, that’s what we end up using a lot of these languages for.
I can only think of a couple other widely-used programming languages designed primarily to build UIs with: Elm, HTML, and Swift. And Swift is really a lot more complicated because it dabbles in other purposes over just UI development. It would be nice to see a Smalltalk-inspired programming language designed around UI programming, that could be used on any platform. So I’m excited to see where this goes!
I call clickbait. It’s not a “distributed system”, just an S3 uploader client. You could probably write one in 280 bytes of Python or Rust too…
I’d love to see that!
Initially I thought it should also be at least possible, if not trivial to do so in for example Python or Ruby (and of course the article never claims that you can’t do it). But looking more closely I was a bit more skeptical.
TIL we don’t have a smalltalk tag! This is a really neat post.
Objective-S describes itself as “possibly the first general purpose programming language.”, then compares other languages with this claim to be “actually DSLs for the domain of algorithms”.
And then, you see the language…and it’s…a DSL for writing applications using a native UI framework?
I mean, I don’t think it’s a bad-looking language, it just seems to have a really contradictory statement right in the introduction.
Not exactly sure where you are getting this from. Yes, a bunch of the examples are framework-specific, but of course for something that’s about better ways of gluing together components you need to start with some components.
fib(n)doesn’t cut it, that’s algorithmic. Unless you also want to create all the components from scratch, they’ll come from somewhere, but that doesn’t mean the mechanisms are in any way specific to that.So I guess the question is why the mechanisms also look like they are specific to one UI framework, even though they are not.
I guess I need to add a lot more examples.
Thanks for the feedback, really useful!
The examples were pretty useful in showing me what the language actually was like. I’m glad you included them, because that sentence just totally confused me as to what the actual reasoning for Objective-S was. The introductory paragraph felt super academic, but then looking down I felt like I could see the practicality in the code. I’m not sure you need more/better examples, just a more down-to-earth introduction, showcasing the language’s strengths. After you explained it here I kinda do get what you mean, like those other languages are designed so you can write algorithms, and ergonomically are not truly designed for primarily writing UIs. Yet, that’s what we end up using a lot of these languages for.
I can only think of a couple other widely-used programming languages designed primarily to build UIs with: Elm, HTML, and Swift. And Swift is really a lot more complicated because it dabbles in other purposes over just UI development. It would be nice to see a Smalltalk-inspired programming language designed around UI programming, that could be used on any platform. So I’m excited to see where this goes!
Thanks, that’s really useful feedback!