On Wednesday, July 1, 2015 at 7:07:03 AM UTC-4, AJ Campbell wrote: > JSON is probably going to be the go-to format to send/receive renderable 3D > packets. The thought of doing it with XML makes me feel ill. I'm sure Racket > can handle JSON data (it very well might already for all I know), but > Javascript found its way across the whole stack (among other reasons) because > we love the idea of having a universal language to eliminate the > serialization between client and server, plus it knocks down communication > barriers between front-end and back-end team members.
I'm one of those who really wish Javascript hasn't spread across multiple stacks. I also question the effectiveness of having an universal language represented by JavaScript used for front-end and back-end. As a person who regularly juggles both modes in his daily job, the APIs and execution models in two cases are very different and result in mental context-switch costs regardless of whether they use the same language or not. Personally I think team members would be better off communicating via design planning and documentation rather than relying on whether languages they use for respective project areas happen to coincide. I also have serious questions about long-term viability of JavaScript now that WebAssembly has been announced. Once it's mature, I suspect JS will be abandoned or at least usage severely reduced with corresponding drop in support in other stacks. The irony is WebAssembly is designed to be a compressed abstract syntax format! Essentially S-Expressions in a different disguise, so you can argue that Racket/Lisp is already well positioned to target WebAssembly directly for web apps. I figure that Racket is probably better suited as a "universal language" since it's possible to implement languages in it to fit whatever demands diverse developers or problem domains have, including creating non-S-expression-oriented languages. I do realize business considerations have an important impact on what tools are selected, and John Carmack needs to be able to reach a large audience of regular and technical users. I hope he will be able to leverage Racket or preferred Scheme variant to accomplish that. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
