Goodbye, OpenLaszlo
After a month of OpenLaszlo, I’ve had enough. Coding in XML just isn’t my style, I’m afraid. (And yes, I know you do half the coding in JavaScript, but that doesn’t change anything.) I don’t think that means XML-based programming languages are inferior or anything like that — if I spent more time wrapping my head around OpenLaszlo, I could probably feel better about it (or I’d have one heck of a sore head). But I don’t have that kind of time. Nor was I getting enough of a “coolness” factor, the way I do when I work with Lisp. This experiment leads me to suspect that I probably wouldn’t like Flex much, either.
So, I’m going back to the basics. Simplicity is good, and so I’ve taken the app I’m working on and pared it down as far as possible. So far, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do the whole thing with Javascript, HTML, and CSS, with a web service providing a connection to the server (written in ASP.NET most likely, though I’d prefer Python and may end up going that route), and anything else in Python. I might use MochiKit or Dojo to make the Javascript end easier to code, but I’m not sure yet if I really need it. (Why not Rails? Well, the server is unfortunately a Windows box running IIS, and I’ve heard that Rails doesn’t perform all that well on IIS. I wish I could get the server moved to Linux, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, Python is still very nice to work with, and I haven’t caught wind of any performance issues with it on IIS.)
At any rate, this stack feels a lot better. When I was working with OpenLaszlo, I felt like I was in a straitjacket. Not much fun. Or “open.” (Again, keep in mind that these are subjective impressions; who knows, maybe OpenLaszlo is your style.)
In the meantime, I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp and liking it.
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Posted in Ruby on Rails, Coding, Python, XML, Javascript, Lisp
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I enjoyed ANSI Common Lisp when I first read it, but the more books I read about Common Lisp the clearer it became that Paul Graham has a quirky style worth some effort to avoid emulating. (Adapting the ideas without the style is handy.)
P. Tucker Withington is one of the folks working on OpenLaszlo, he’s an old-school Symbolics Lisp hacker.
I have for the past month been using OL. Like any other full-featured GUI system, it is complex and takes time to learn. That said, I’m really liking OL. With no specific issues cited, distaste for XML sounds a bit superficial (and yes, I’ve done substantial work in CL, Haskell, Scala, and other languages). If you really can’t stand it, just use some s-exp-to-XML source translator. :) Semantics are what matters, and OL has terrifically useful abstractions.
(It’s also lightyears ahead of JavaFX, which I also happened try.)