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Eight EXCELLENT languages for the fondleslab-friendly Intranet of Thingies
Shifting software paradigms and so forth
Fresh for 14, faded by 15?
If all your aspersions are safely cast, what horses are you actually backing? Compulsory Objective C for toddlers? Malbolge?
Fab technology #1: the dominant browser-side language will be JavaScript.
As opposed to the dialect of VBScript supported by IE5, I suppose? Astonishingly prescient. Definitely worth reading you just for that.
Tell you what: you stay sat there and continue picking your nose while I go pluck my North Face from its hook.
No, wait, come back. You misunderstand. I'm saying that it's ok to ignore these JavaScript-as-the-assembly-language-of-the-internet compilers. You don't need to recompile your Ruby routines for FireFox, nor massage your Clipper programs to run under Chrome.
I urge you to be suspicious of compiling one high level language to another. You put an extra layer or interpretation and bother between yourself and the machine, and one not necessarily that will increase your control or expressiveness.
Hum. Are you really just trying to say 'Don't bother your head with CoffeeScript', and so sneak in a negative prediction masquerading as a positive one?
I don't know how you can think that.
Fine. Let me see if I can infer your other blazingly-obvious deductions. You've done down XML so I guess Fab technology #2 is JSON, right?
Werl, now...
And by the same system, your reluctance to touch SOAP suggests Fab technology #3 is REST?
Like shooting Type II diabetic fish in an undersized barrel. And you'll be backing git for Fab technology #4? On account of its distributed model, speed and ease of merging?
No.
No?
No. I'm backing it because it has been compulsory since 17th March 2013.
Huh? Compulsory? What happened? A conciliatory gesture from the Elders of the Internet to git-meister Linus on the occasion of the ten thousandth 'Is this the year of the Linux desktop' article?
Nope. Donglegate.
Double-u tee eff? Oh, wait, I see. The 'forking' innuendo. Good point. To avoid the wrath of the demons of 4chan, we had perhaps better perform the formal nerdal responses. I'd love to fork your repo, Verity.
And your dongles look positively huge today, honey. Amen. Let's get on with it. Fab Technology #5 is C++, again, just because it always is, and Fab Technology #6 is a Javascript library...
JQuery?
Nah, JQuery is, as it were, the BIOS of the client-side webstack. I'm talking about which of the dozens of MVC frameworks to choose.
'BIOS of the client-side webstack' indeed. All right then, which MVC framework?
Fab Technology #6 is a AngularJS. Because it is clever, elegant, Google-backed and has really taken off. And seems to work pretty well. Season it with a hint of Bootstrap and you can knock up a SPA in no time.
Number seven?
Fab Technology #7 is NodeJs.
The mad server-side JavaScript that avoids thread blocking by having callbacks passed as the last argument?
Yup. It's fantastic: efficient, versatile and...
...and you quickly end up indented off the right hand margin, imprisoned inside a huge stack of nested lambdas.
That can be a problem now, but maybe not for long. And with Node you can ditch Apache and PHP and all that limp LAMP stuff, and stick with one language both client and server side.
Wait a moment. I've heard of this. You are just describing the MEAN stack. Your last nomination will therefore be MongoDB which, as is well known, is...
As is well known, is web scale. Indeed. Have seen that old vid, been unfairly influenced, cowering in the bosom of Maria for the time being.
No, my final choice, Kirsty, Fab Technology #8, is the TypeScript language, combining the flexibility of JavaScript with the sanity of static typing.
JavaScripters bang on about automated testing not because they believe in BDD or other testing-is-nicer-than-food approaches, but because otherwise they have no way of picking up on elementary typos. TypeScript fixes this.
But... but you've flatly contradicted yourself. Your Dud #2 was 'No Microsoft', your Fab #1 was 'No compile-to-JavaScript languages'. TypeScript falls into both these categories.
Um. Um, yes, but it's open source, which mitigates the MS contamination, and, um, it's not so much another language, more a sort of JavaScript++ (may Crockford forgive me), um...
Pah! Cop-out.
And a happy new year to you too. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
