I'm actually surprised JS has made it this far. I'm not convinced it will go much further, though. Can someone convince me, please? :)
I'll try. At some point in the past, you predicted (possibly implicitly, given that we're dealing with "surprise") that JS wouldn't reach the performance it has today. But it evidently did. So you're not very good at predicting the development JavaScript's performance profile. Currently you believe it can't go much further. Hence, given the historical precedent that we have, it probably will. There you go.
Am I the only one who thinks they're not exactly helping their cause with pretentious marketspeak like "an integrated intellectual and experiential computing narrative for supporting collective and individual creativity"?
In every argument about dynamic language performance for the last 15 years, Self has been the final word: "If Self can reach 1/4 to 1/2 the speed of native C code, why can't JavaScript? Why can't Ruby?" Well, JavaScript and Lua are slowly getting there, and Ruby might in a few more years. Even if Self could only reach that level of performance occasionally, it has been an inspiration to many others. It's great to hea…
The article mentions the lingering fear of Smalltalk images but virtual machine images offering hope for the future. I experienced this with Smalltalk (Gemstone) apps quite some time ago and that feeling remained with Java on the desktop. What would it take to get non-native environments to integrate better and so gain better acceptance with end-users? Is the browser a better vector since end-users are more accepting…
He is not talking about non-native look and feel, but about image-based development. That is: you directly modify running state of VM and then save all of this state into giant file. Source code is often contained only in this giant binary file, or produced by some specialized tool later. This breaks many common development workflows, for example it is hard to integrate with common (file-based) version control systems.
To get a feeling for the Self language and what was (is) possible, you should (if you can, of course) take the time to watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching. (Disclaimer, I think Dave Ungar has done tremendous things for PLDI; interested people should definitely check out his UC-Berkeley PhD thesis of 1986, easily one of the best I have e…
Am I the only one who thinks they're not exactly helping their cause with pretentious marketspeak like "an integrated intellectual and experiential computing narrative for supporting collective and individual creativity"?
Normally, I'd agree, but in the context of Self, Smalltalk, Xerox PARC, and everything that have come out of them, it's justified.
The article mentions the lingering fear of Smalltalk images but virtual machine images offering hope for the future. I experienced this with Smalltalk (Gemstone) apps quite some time ago and that feeling remained with Java on the desktop. What would it take to get non-native environments to integrate better and so gain better acceptance with end-users? Is the browser a better vector since end-users are more accepting…
He is not talking about non-native look and feel, but about image-based development. That is: you directly modify running state of VM and then save all of this state into giant file. Source code is often contained only in this giant binary file, or produced by some specialized tool later. This breaks many common development workflows, for example it is hard to integrate with common (file-based) version control system…
That's true. The problem is that source code is only a fraction of the knowledge contained in the system. In most source-code-based systems, you would write code for building a lookup table, or for reading one from storage. This code would be executed at application startup. In Smalltalk or image-based lisp, you simply make the table and save the image. Unfortunately, the source code now doesn't fully describe the system. Systems like ENVY are intended to provide a process for putting the data in the source.
I'm actually surprised JS has made it this far. I'm not convinced it will go much further, though. Can someone convince me, please? :)
I'll try. At some point in the past, you predicted (possibly implicitly, given that we're dealing with "surprise") that JS wouldn't reach the performance it has today. But it evidently did. So you're not very good at predicting the development JavaScript's performance profile. Currently you believe it can't go much further. Hence, given the historical precedent that we have, it probably will. There you go.
LOL! You make a compelling argument.
It would be nice if the v8/spidermonkey/etc teams gave some insight into what kind of optimisations they have made/are making.
To get a feeling for the Self language and what was (is) possible, you should (if you can, of course) take the time to watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching. (Disclaimer, I think Dave Ungar has done tremendous things for PLDI; interested people should definitely check out his UC-Berkeley PhD thesis of 1986, easily one of the best I have e…
That video is very good, but don't forget the research papers from the Self project either ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html ) Particularly good: "An Efficient Implementation of Self" ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementati... ) "Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical" ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/practical.ht... ) "Organizing Programs Wi…
Yeah, I know--it seems to be a recent pattern of mine to forget some links and add-on pointers...
The papers are very good, in addition to these, I find the following to be particularly important (and very well written, too):
That video is very good, but don't forget the research papers from the Self project either ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html ) Particularly good: "An Efficient Implementation of Self" ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementati... ) "Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical" ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/practical.ht... ) "Organizing Programs Wi…
Yeah, I know--it seems to be a recent pattern of mine to forget some links and add-on pointers... The papers are very good, in addition to these, I find the following to be particularly important (and very well written, too): - the classic PICs (polymorphic inline caching) paper ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/pics.html ) - Urs Hoelzle's PhD thesis ( http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/u…
Definitely, the PIC paper.
Somehow I missed Urs Hoelzle's thesis. Nice! It has some papers on dynamically compiling APL in the biblio I haven't seen, too. :)