Curl [was RE: Java]

[Tony Kimball <address@hidden>]

Quoth Chris Double on Tuesday, 11 December: 
: One thing I like about Curl
: is the way it mixes text and the programming language itself. So
: producing things where the textual content is the main focus with some
: dynamic parts is very easy. Oh, and the chance to win $3,000 in
: programming competitions ;-)

Like JSP, PHP, eRuby, ePerl, etc.  It may be worthwhile to observe
that a great deal of emphasis, in the web development literature, has
been placed on separating content, design, and code into independently
maintainable domains, so that teams can be lightly coupled across
boundaries of differing expertise and/or authority.  Hence, for
example, the Velocity template engine for Apache.

I am largely ignorant of Curl, but to the best of my knowledge, it
doesn't seem to fit this model -- which may be just great, in part
because it integrates server- and client-side execution, and hence has
a very different model than dynamic-content + DHTML -- a model in
which different considerations may apply.  It would be interesting to
hear the view from 10km on this subject, from Christopher Barber, as
well as being quite apposite to issues of designing languages for
specific application domains.

: I thought it was 'T', the Yale Scheme. 

T really rocked.  And it made a great dissertation, which every
native-code dynamic-cum-lightweight language compiler-writer should
read some time, especially Parrot JIT writers. 

I fondly recall that I did all of my undergrad numerical analysis
assignments in T, just to twist the T.A.'s brain -- Krylov subspaces
without do loops *evil grin*.  If it had better retargetability, it
might have dominated the world -- or at least my corner.