Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I'm still going with Steve Yegge's opinion from a few years ago for the rest of this decade: JavaScript. It might have been around for ages but it's just coming into its own as a full-scale, popular language that isn't a total PITA to work with in any serious way (unlike 5-10 years ago).

I've had a good (but lucky) record with checking out languages ahead of the curve but little except JavaScript really excites me right now. For a zillion reasons (and intuition), I'm bullish on Scala, Lua, Ruby (but only if significant implementation improvements come soon or Apple more seriously backs it) and Go, neutral on Python and Haskell, and bearish on Clojure, Java and Erlang. (Feel free to quote this back to me if I get it wrong!).

View on HN

The best part about Javascript is that because it's a functional language it has amazingly deep capabilities of being improved and modified through libraries. The Javascript that people write today (often reliant on prototype/jQuery, node.js, etc.) is quite different from the code that people were writing 10 years ago. The same is likely to be true in another 10 years, even if the language spec. itself doesn't change one iota.

Very true. It's also one of the only languages out there to let you inspect functions' source code, which means you can implement full-blown Lisp macros in it using eval(). Given its popularity and the runtime performance of V8, I think this makes it the ultimate language for the next decade.

It's also one of the only languages out there to let you inspect functions' source code

Got any pointers on this? I've been searching a little and unable to find this and haven't heard of this level of introspection before.

Well actually, I did end up writing Lisp on top of Javascript this way: http://github.com/spencertipping/caterwaul.

The basic mechanism is to call f.toString() on some function, then construct a new one the way you want it using either eval() (for non-IE browsers), or new Function(code) (for all browsers). Caterwaul leverages this by implementing a JS parser, defining a macro syntax, and letting you determine how the code gets rewritten. (So you can do things like let[x = 5] in x + 1, which is valid JS to begin with but nobody would ever use it :) )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com