When Francisco Tolmasky launched Objective J, he wrote a really interesting article that still impacts how I think about this stuff more than a decade later.
Francisco was working on an in-browser slideshow tool like Google Slides, but in the late 00s. To power it, he invented his own language: Objective-J. It had its own toolchain, in the days when most developers were just writing JavaScript inline or maybe in .js files.
Remember, it took React a few years to catch on because it required command line tools to translate JSX to JS. This had the same friction, but years earlier.
This was the thesis behind Objective-J: In the late 1900s, C was the foundation of a good language, but it needed another layer of abstraction on top of it to be more ergonomic. The developers at NeXT/Apple built that layer and called it Objective-C. Objective-J saw the same potential in JavaScript, and ported the ergonomics of Objective-C atop it. It basically tried to do for JavaScript what Objective-C had done for C.
This was the critical part of the argument:
JavaScript (in the era before modules, => functions, and the other current niceties) was the core of a useful language, but it needed a more ergonomic layer on top. Libraries like jQuery were building de-facto DSLs, but calling them libraries. Objective-J was taking conceptual responsibility for being a language on top of JavaScript, instead of being "just" a library. By owning up to being its own language, they could take syntactical liberties that they couldn't under the constraints of being just another JS library.
Agreed. I fudged quite a lot in my post to make it accessible to the layman. Triee to explain to a UX designer I know that "D3 is a library for JavaScript that..." And I saw their brain switch off live in front of me.
D3 is a good example of inventing a language without inventing a syntax for that language. It very much is a DSL implemented in JavaScript.
When Francisco Tolmasky launched Objective J, he wrote a really interesting article that still impacts how I think about this stuff more than a decade later.
Francisco was working on an in-browser slideshow tool like Google Slides, but in the late 00s. To power it, he invented his own language: Objective-J. It had its own toolchain, in the days when most developers were just writing JavaScript inline or maybe in .js files.
Remember, it took React a few years to catch on because it required command line tools to translate JSX to JS. This had the same friction, but years earlier.
This was the thesis behind Objective-J: In the late 1900s, C was the foundation of a good language, but it needed another layer of abstraction on top of it to be more ergonomic. The developers at NeXT/Apple built that layer and called it Objective-C. Objective-J saw the same potential in JavaScript, and ported the ergonomics of Objective-C atop it. It basically tried to do for JavaScript what Objective-C had done for C.
This was the critical part of the argument:
JavaScript (in the era before modules, => functions, and the other current niceties) was the core of a useful language, but it needed a more ergonomic layer on top. Libraries like jQuery were building de-facto DSLs, but calling them libraries. Objective-J was taking conceptual responsibility for being a language on top of JavaScript, instead of being "just" a library. By owning up to being its own language, they could take syntactical liberties that they couldn't under the constraints of being just another JS library.
ok, I'll buy that, definitely feels like it
Agreed. I fudged quite a lot in my post to make it accessible to the layman. Triee to explain to a UX designer I know that "D3 is a library for JavaScript that..." And I saw their brain switch off live in front of me.
Semantics matter more than literals sometimes.
*EDIT: Grammar. I was typing on my phone. Soz.