@jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron

The Web 1.0 wasn't built on Javascript, but the 2020 Web is built on Javascript over CSS over SGML over HTTP over (webapp server) over SQL - at least six completely separate syntax / semantic layers. This seems non-optimal.

What if we removed everything except the somewhat-Smalltalky Javascript?

Could we rebuild the Web on just JS? Would it be better? It would be reasonably trivial to try, because Node.js would be the webapp server.

@jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron

Alternatively, if rebuilding the entire Web on Javascript message sends (modulo maybe a NotUnderstood facility like Smalltalk had, or whatever else might be needed) demonstrably *doesn't* work, maybe because it's true that state needs to be exposed in some reliable manner...

.. could we go the other way, build a full-stack programming language on an analog of HTTP/REST?

Why or why not?

If 'not' to either of these, what are we missing?

@jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron

One thing that has always bugged me deeply about OOP is that although it's supposedly all about messages, there is no standard or reliable way to represent 'just a chunk of structured data'.

I mean, you *could* conceivably represent 'a foo with parameters bar, baz' as something like

new foo(bar,baz)

or (something).foo(bar,baz)

but.... those aren't really defined in any sense, and aren't good for large messages (kilobytes to gigabytes).

Do we know why?

@jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron

You'd *think* that since constructors are a pretty universal part of OOP, that every conceivable data type or structured message WOULD be an instance (sic) of

new foo(bar,baz)

BUT

that just gives you a local reference to an instance of foo

Once you've got that reference... how do you communicate it to another system? It's not a 'message' in any meaningful sense now. Messages can be 'sent'. Objects... are not designed to be 'sent'.

It feels incomplete.

@natecull @jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron Talking about method calls as "messages" is something that came out of Smalltalk, and is in my opinion incredibly misleading.

I've had debates with people online who strongly claim there is a difference between method calls in most Java-style object oriented languages and something like Smalltalk that talks about "messages". Most of the arguments seems to revolve around the idea that you can send messages (i.e. call methods) on instances that have not previously been declared to support such method calls.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to dynamic vs. static dispatch. But even for dynamic dispatch, referring to method calls as "messages" does nothing but confuse users and make it seem to complex than it actually is.

@loke @natecull @jauntywunderkind420 @enkiv2 @byron C++ and subsequently Java made that mistake in understanding,, as event based gui systems were not widely experienced yet. . messages are more like events than method calls. you can think of it as tthe difference between desugaring to
sendmsg(objectId, methodname, params) : void
vs
methodname(objectpointer, parans) : somevalue

the difference seems subtle but the former, with an extra level of indirection guves the dispatcher more freedom

@libc @byron @zensaiyuki @natecull @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

There are TK erlang bindings. About ten years ago, I ported a large prolog project to erlang (though I didn't, and still don't, really know erlang) & wrote a fair amount of gui code related to that.

But, thing is, the GUI toolkit itself was not erlangy. It was a binding to tk, which is C++ and really intended to be embedded in tcl. So, for instance, it wants to be single-threaded with an event loop.

@libc @byron @zensaiyuki @natecull @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Maybe I used Wx rather than Tk. I don't really remember. It's still sort of the same issue.

And, of course, 'antiquated' is kind of funny because the ideal we're reaching for (properly message-based OO GUI toolkit) is... in smalltalk 78.

@zensaiyuki @libc @byron @natecull @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

The underlying implementation of smalltalk for the alto turned messages into method calls for performance reasons. From what I understand, the language itself didn't break the message paradigm despite this, & graphics programming was async-friendly. (But, my familiarity with it is currently mostly second-hand.)

@zensaiyuki @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Right! That's one the things that fascinates me. Berners-Lee writes WWW on a NeXT, which at least advertised itself as object-oriented, and if this factoid is true then he writes it heavily relying on NeXT's OOP framework...

... But no trace of that framework and its objects extends over the network. Isn't that odd? And interesting?

Naively one would expect WWW pages to have been serialised NeXT object classes. They very weren't.

@zensaiyuki @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

For comparison: from the same era, Microsoft Word .doc files of early 1990s were *massively* more OOP than the Web. They were literally just collections of objects but *because* they were just RAM dumps of objects they were unsuited to traversing multiple systems.

And MS thought they'd beat the Web because they were OOP and 'modern' and Web wasn't, until around 1995.

@a_breakin_glass @zensaiyuki @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Right. I think that's the part that still niggles at me. Why *did* objects end up just being an implementation detail, when the whole idea of an object was 'here is a small machine that is a thing'?

'An object is a thing' *seems* to make intuitive sense. BUT!

The BIG but is that an object is generally 'a thing you can't give to anyone'.

To 'give' an object you have to radically destructure it. Parse to text etc.

@a_breakin_glass @zensaiyuki @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

So as a programming paradigm, objects seems.... not to be as universal as it wanted to be.

Something about objects seems to weld them to very specific machine contexts that they can't be easily unwelded.

Data formats that can be easily transmitted, and survive multiple systems, seem to be very non-objecty.

This doesn't seem to be what any of the OOP proponents ever wanted. But why couldn't they see that?

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

I really like that idea of inverting the application state into a message-like thing that the client holds as a ticket and sends to the server.

However I wish we weren't trying to do that over a protocol built to transfer and display literal documents, because nothing about a REST application is anything like a document.

Especially if we wanted to scale *down* to the desktop - we'd want a very small, fast protocol.

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Hmm, what's HAL? Link?

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

I guess I'm wondering if JSON is too heavyweight to be used as a desktop protocol, even for widgets within a windowl? Or do we all have enough excess CPU cycles now that that's not a problem?

Cos if it is too heavyweight then we gonna need another protocol.

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Man everything would be much nicer if JSON hadn't made commas and quotes mandatory.

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

It does seem weird that they even needed an RFC to specify that.

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Yep.

I guess that's why I keep coming back to 'at the bottom of the tower of bits, you probably just want something like an array of machine words, a type tag, a length' and even then that gets messy, with bitness, word size, memory allocation, etc.

@zensaiyuki @a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 @libc @byron @jauntywunderkind420 @loke

Is there any One True Standard structured clone algorithm, or just a general approach?