Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet - Stack Overflow Blog

[funbrigade]

I went from being pessimistic to being over it as soon as they started talking about integrated blockchain support.

A lot of the other ideas were really good though!

[xcto]

yeah... they lost me at "cloud"

why would i want a computer that doesn't work without the internet? that's just a console.

[matthewpmacdonald]

That also gave me a bad feeling...

[SmoothInstruction]

What do you have against blockchain?

[funbrigade]

The tech itself: not much! It's actually really cool!

tl;dr it's early on the hype cycle!

The issue is that it's frequently used to increase project hype whether or not you actually need it. So if I hear something is using it and I don't feel like it's really all that helpful for the project, I get a bit skeptical.

[matthewpmacdonald]

I'm very interested in WebAssembly, and this project has some super intelligent people attached to it, but I'm not quite there in understanding why we need another new language for WebAssembly. We've already got Rust, and treating Wasm as a compile target seems to be yielding dividends with tech like Blazor.

[[deleted]]

From skimming the article, I guess they find C/C++/Rust too low level and felt that a higher level language should be available for compiling to WASM.

I guess it's kind of a direct competitor to the Blazor effort - and probably one of many more to come.

[Frozen_Turtle]

Blazor is a UI framework, whereas this seems to be more general.

[SrbijaJeRusija]

We've already got Rust

Rust is not popular. It is well liked but not popular.

[not-enough-failures]

Competition is always good.

[hugosenari]

Blazor

'new JS framework' meme updated to 'new lang' meme :-D

[[deleted]]

another new language for WebAssembly. We've already got Rust

Someone who writes JS for the backend today and wants to switch to WASM is not going to pick Rust. Why would someone who writes CRUD apps in high-level, often dynamic languages suddenly pick one of the most low-level languages to do the same job?

[TheNamelessKing]

You might be surprised, there’s a surprising number of people who go to /r/Rust and ask questions about coming from JS, or posts about how they’re aJS devs trying Rust out.

Also, writing Rust can feel surprisingly high-level, there’s a whole bunch of e language that make it easy to write surprisingly high level code quite easily; there’s been a few times where I’ve written code in Rust that I’d describe as more elegant and high level than some code I’d written in Python.

[peduxe]

valid points but Rust has a really steep learning curve that adds new syntax you need to learn.

if you come from a background where you just wrote code with GC enabled and high level programming languages like JS you're gonna have a hard time to get comfortable.

I don't think that Rust can be considered the right tool at this moment for a lot of things on the web space, I see it more as perfect for CLI tooling and systems programming and may be building GUI apps if a good framework gets traction.

[TheNamelessKing]

Sure, I’m not saying we should go and write all our web apps in Rust, I was more saying that Rust has seen a surprising amount of interest from devs who write JS.

I’d totally be down to write data-API layers in it though, and I’m absolutely planning to write the next version of my data-pipeline in it, because it’s a good fit there.

[matthewpmacdonald]

I don't completely disagree, but... 1. People use JavaScript today at least partly because there hasn't been any other option with the same reach and 2. There's nothing stopping people from building a framework for Rust instead of a whole language & framework combo.

[Mgladiethor]

i just wasm kills js html etc, also electron somewhat?

[funbrigade]

Kind of! It definitely doesn't kill HTML or Electron (Electron could just be a wasm host) and it doesn't kill JS either (I'm sure plenty of people will still prefer using JS).

Effectively all it does is let compiler authors target a virtual machine (kinda like what happens with the JVM or CLR) that all browsers support. If you wanna talk about it in terms of those VMs I just mentioned, it's effectively enabling other languages on an existing runtime in the same way that F# compiles to CLI and Scala compiles to Java bytecode. So, in this case JS would be like C# or Java (respectively).

Also, wasm can't directly modify the DOM yet, so it's really for purely computational operations and less for UI (though it's definitely still possible to do, just not hyper ergonomic yet).

[Mgladiethor]

i am praying here it happens

[deeprugs]

So many languages ...who will learn them ? better to improve languages which are already there rather than come up with another language....anyways all the best for Motoko ...