scattered
7/15/2014 3:11:00 AM
On Monday, July 14, 2014 5:28:05 PM UTC-4, Christoph Michael Becker wrote:
> John C wrote:
>
> > On Monday, July 14, 2014 1:40:17 PM UTC-4, Michael Haufe (TNO) wrote:
> >> On Monday, July 14, 2014 9:50:23 AM UTC-5, Simeon Chaos wrote:
> >>
> >>> Taijilang is A new language which is compiled to javascript.
> >>
> >> Off topic for this group, but I think you know that already...
> >
> > Out of curiosity, why do you consider this off-topic? I would
> > think that a tool for generating javascript is topical for
> > comp.lang.javascript. A detailed discussion of the new language
> > would be off topic, but simply alerting javascript programmers
>
> > about a potentially useful tool seems reasonable.
>
>
> Counterquestion: would some language implementation that compiles to C
>
> be on topic for comp.lang.c?
>
> --
>
> Christoph M. Becker
Good question. I would say that it depends. If C were simply the target of
the compiler but the language itself had nothing to do with C, then no -- it
probably wouldn't be on topic (though various technical questions related to
the C end of the process would be on topic). On the other hand, if the language
was constructed explicitly to interact with C (e.g. being able to write functions which can be easily called from C programs)then I would say that,
yes, it could be on topic (especially just a simple announcement of the
creation of a new tool which might be of interest to people reading the
newsgroup). In the case of this "Taijilang", the github site explicitly
mentions the ability to work with Node.js, so I took it that it was intended
to be part of the broader JavaScript ecosystem rather then an outright
replacement.
I think that one of the more interesting trends in the last 15 years or so is
the rise of polygot programming (e.g. dot net or the various languages like Clojure that target the Java Virtual Machine). In the last few years it seems
that there is a move towards doing something similar in the JavaScript world.
It is clearly part of being a well-rounded Java programmer to at least be aware
of things such as Clojure. Similarly, a JavaScript programmer should at least be aware of things like CoffeeScript.