On Jan 27, 2009, at 1:05 PM, Michaeljohn Clement wrote:
+1
This is the conclusion I have come to in building collaborative Web applications.
I agree that there seems to be a gap here in the Haskell Web frameworks people are building.
Yes. It's a dead end and it seems a shame to waste effort on it.
I do not believe compiling Haskell to ECMAScript/JavaScript is a productive avenue. There is too much pain in trying to abstract away the JavaScript model only to write everything in Haskell and end up with worse performance as a reward.
I believe GWT, among other projects, has shown that you can create faster executing JavaScript by compiling from a statically-typed language than you can by hand-coding JavaScript (for one, you can do a multitude of inlining and simplification transformations that are not easy in a dynamic language). There is much room for research and development, of course, especially in the context of functional languages.
There is very little wrong with ECMAScript if people would only learn it properly and play to its strengths instead of trying to turn it into things it is not.
I like JavaScript, and I love ECMAScript 4 (which unfortunately won't see the light of day), but they are not functional languages. And for the foreseeable future, there is one and exactly one scripting language for the browser, and anyone who wants to use a different language will have to do so by compiling to JavaScript. Regards, John A. De Goes N-BRAIN, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101