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Comment by moron4hire

2 days ago

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.

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moron4hire

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bsimpson  2 days ago

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.