Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk and Javascript(infoq.com)

23 pointsby benvor 17 Jahren12 comments

Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk and Javascript

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-trendly

4 comments

iceyvor 17 Jahren

Seriously, that dude has his hands in so much cool stuff.

I'd like to posit that Avi Bryant is actually twins posing as one person. Neither of whom ever sleeps.

avibryantvor 17 Jahren

Busted. The hardest thing is always trimming our beards to exactly the same length.

Edit: the real answer is that I work with great hackers who aren't as mouthy as I am and so don't show up in interviews etc - my "twins" are Andrew, Ben, and Luke...

ionfishvor 17 Jahren

On the subject of compiling other languages to JavaScript, you might be interested in frp-js. It's a Functional Reactive DSL in Haskell that compiles to JavaScript.

http://github.com/sebastiaanvisser/frp-js/

tumultvor 17 Jahren

dude aweeeessssooooommmee. i'm definitely going to check this out later. i had seen the YHC/JS backend a while back but it looked like progress there had seized up. this seems pretty new. any experience with it?

ionfishvor 17 Jahren

I haven't done too much with it yet, to be honest — things have been a bit crazy at work — but FRP seems like a really interesting potential approach to JS-based web interfaces, and I can understand the desire to write Haskell and then compile it to JS (the assembly of the web, as plenty of people in the last three years have said). FRP JavaScript doesn't seem to have taken off in a big way in the three years since Flapjax came out, but perhaps we'll see that change soon.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1771

tumultvor 17 Jahren

flapjax seemed cool, but I really just can't stand writing with JS syntax and all the baggage that comes with it.

my current JS project (actually objective-j with cappuccino) is weighing in at over 5000 semicolons, 80% of which is probably glue code. FRP (or bindings if it's imperative) would reduce a lot of it, but it wouldn't make JS any "safer" to write in. i'd still get goofy mistakes all over the place that you take for granted won't happen in haskell/ML/etc.

I looked at ocamljs which can use FROC but it looked like it had a pretty large function calling overhead. YHC javascript backend also looked like it had a large overhead.

I also checked out scheme2js (actually I wrote the first version of my JS app in it, but with no GUI, haha) but it relies very heavily on the rest of HOP to do useful stuff in a browser, which I would not be using. Also, debugging in it was a nightmare. Inria does mad cool stuff though.

[deleted]vor 17 Jahren

olliesaundersvor 17 Jahren

Avi, who's from Vancouver, seems to have very similar accent and body language to the people I know from Toronto; (I lived there for a year). I find this interesting.

avibryantvor 17 Jahren

I find that interesting too - in general, I find the Vancouver accent to be closer to other places on the west coast (Seattle, Portland, SF) than to the eastern Canadian accents. But there are no doubt also elements that correlate with country instead of coast, and you must be picking up on those.

I also speak faster and am more animated in interviews than I would be in most other situations, which probably pushes me farther towards the east coast stereotypes than I am in "real life"...

sjsvor 17 Jahren

I grew up in Ontario and have lived in BC for 6 years now, and find the accents quite different. Most Ontarians I know here agree.

olliesaundersvor 17 Jahren

Hm, OK. Could be more mannerisms then.

sjsvor 17 Jahren

Any news on the MagLev public github release? Supposed to hit soon iirc.

avibryantvor 17 Jahren

If you're asking me - I haven't hacked on MagLev for over a year, so I'm pretty out of the loop. From tracking http://twitter.com/MagLev, though, it sure looks like they're getting close.

[deleted]vor 17 Jahren