

Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk and Javascript - ben
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-trendly

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icey
Seriously, that dude has his hands in so much cool stuff.

I'd like to posit that Avi Bryant is actually twins posing as one person.
Neither of whom ever sleeps.

~~~
avibryant
Busted. The hardest thing is always trimming our beards to exactly the same
length.

Edit: the real answer is that I work with great hackers who aren't as mouthy
as I am and so don't show up in interviews etc - my "twins" are Andrew, Ben,
and Luke...

~~~
ionfish
On the subject of compiling other languages to JavaScript, you might be
interested in frp-js. It's a Functional Reactive DSL in Haskell that compiles
to JavaScript.

<http://github.com/sebastiaanvisser/frp-js/>

~~~
tumult
dude aweeeessssooooommmee. i'm definitely going to check this out later. i had
seen the YHC/JS backend a while back but it looked like progress there had
seized up. this seems pretty new. any experience with it?

~~~
ionfish
I haven't done too much with it yet, to be honest — things have been a bit
crazy at work — but FRP seems like a really interesting potential approach to
JS-based web interfaces, and I can understand the desire to write Haskell and
then compile it to JS (the assembly of the web, as plenty of people in the
last three years have said). FRP JavaScript doesn't seem to have taken off in
a big way in the three years since Flapjax came out, but perhaps we'll see
that change soon.

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1771>

~~~
tumult
flapjax seemed cool, but I really just can't stand writing with JS syntax and
all the baggage that comes with it.

my current JS project (actually objective-j with cappuccino) is weighing in at
over 5000 semicolons, 80% of which is probably glue code. FRP (or bindings if
it's imperative) would reduce a lot of it, but it wouldn't make JS any "safer"
to write in. i'd still get goofy mistakes all over the place that you take for
granted won't happen in haskell/ML/etc.

I looked at ocamljs which can use FROC but it looked like it had a pretty
large function calling overhead. YHC javascript backend also looked like it
had a large overhead.

I also checked out scheme2js (actually I wrote the first version of my JS app
in it, but with no GUI, haha) but it relies very heavily on the rest of HOP to
do useful stuff in a browser, which I would not be using. Also, debugging in
it was a nightmare. Inria does mad cool stuff though.

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olliesaunders
Avi, who's from Vancouver, seems to have very similar accent and body language
to the people I know from Toronto; (I lived there for a year). I find this
interesting.

~~~
sjs
I grew up in Ontario and have lived in BC for 6 years now, and find the
accents quite different. Most Ontarians I know here agree.

~~~
olliesaunders
Hm, OK. Could be more mannerisms then.

------
sjs
Any news on the MagLev public github release? Supposed to hit soon iirc.

~~~
avibryant
If you're asking me - I haven't hacked on MagLev for over a year, so I'm
pretty out of the loop. From tracking <http://twitter.com/MagLev>, though, it
sure looks like they're getting close.

