Comments on: Closures, Javascript And The Arrow Of Time http://gen5.info/q/2009/06/23/closures-javascript-and-the-arrow-of-time/ Towards Intelligent Systems Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:37:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: Paul Houle http://gen5.info/q/2009/06/23/closures-javascript-and-the-arrow-of-time/comment-page-1/#comment-9230 Paul Houle Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:10:01 +0000 http://gen5.info/q/?p=280#comment-9230 Well, it all depends on how you define "exotic." The actual architecture of the FORTH, Scheme and (older generation) TCL interpreters are archaic. You've got a lexical analyzer, but not a parser, and generally not a bytecode interpreter in the traditional sense. More recent TCL versions have moved in the bytecode direction to improve performance, but classic TCL was essentially LISP with lists implemented as space-separated strings. Javascript is basically an ALGOL-type language with a conventional implementation, but it certainly radical in quite a few ways. Personally I miss ECMAScript 4; I would have liked to have seen a Javascript-like language with stronger typing, better IDE support and more support for programming in the large. It would be appealing to have a programming environment where we could share code on the client and the server, even if it would be a terrible temptation for people to make mistakes Well, it all depends on how you define “exotic.”

The actual architecture of the FORTH, Scheme and (older generation) TCL interpreters are archaic. You’ve got a lexical analyzer, but not a parser, and generally not a bytecode interpreter in the traditional sense. More recent TCL versions have moved in the bytecode direction to improve performance, but classic TCL was essentially LISP with lists implemented as space-separated strings.

Javascript is basically an ALGOL-type language with a conventional implementation, but it certainly radical in quite a few ways.

Personally I miss ECMAScript 4; I would have liked to have seen a Javascript-like language with stronger typing, better IDE support and more support for programming in the large. It would be appealing to have a programming environment where we could share code on the client and the server, even if it would be a terrible temptation for people to make mistakes

]]> By: Keith Braithwaite http://gen5.info/q/2009/06/23/closures-javascript-and-the-arrow-of-time/comment-page-1/#comment-9228 Keith Braithwaite Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:15:55 +0000 http://gen5.info/q/?p=280#comment-9228 "although people associate this power with exotic dynamic languages such as FORTH, Scheme and TCL, closures are becoming a feature of mainstream languages such as Javascript and PHP " Javascript is an exotic dynamic language--but this fact has been carefully concealed. Which is a shame. "although people associate this power with exotic dynamic languages such as FORTH, Scheme and TCL, closures are becoming a feature of mainstream languages such as Javascript and PHP "

Javascript is an exotic dynamic language–but this fact has been carefully concealed. Which is a shame.

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