Your Javascript woes are over!

[point5u]

There is a new language for client-side web development in town, Milescript.

In a few words, it's a high-level, strongly-typed language that compiles to ECMAScript. The compiler is open source and some of the features include:

Inheritance, Abstracts, Interfaces
Delegates and Generic Types
Function and Constructor Overloading
Object-Oriented Design.

A more complete list can be found at http://point5u-trac.cvsdude.com/Milescript/wiki/LanguageFeatures

The compiler is released under the Apache 2 License so feel free to check it out at no cost!

http://milescript.org

[felgall]

Since all that does is to generate javaScript for you and generated code is never as good as what a good programmer can write for themselves and newbies don't understand the sorts of concepts that the overlay is meant to handle, I can't really see any group of programmers who will get much benefit from it.

[NogDog]

My favorite way of handling my JavaScript woes. ;)

[fattymcgee]

Hi felgall,

(I'm one of the Milescript developers, BTW)

It is definitely true that expert programmers can produce quality code in any language they're presented with. However, it's also important to consider how much time it takes the expert programmer to do such a thing, and compare it with how much time it would take the expert programmer to do the same thing in a higher-level language that has a compiler that can produce code reasonably close to the what the expert programmer would have produced. An expert programmer could write a ridiculously fast and efficient game engine in assembler, for instance. But that same expert programmer could write the same thing in a higher-level language like C or C++ in a much smaller amount of time. The C or C++ game engine is plenty fast enough, and is loads easier to write and maintain than the assembly.

As for novices and lesser-skilled programmers, they can certainly learn basic OO concepts available in modern languages. Doing so is going to make them better programmers, regardless of whatever programming language they choose to use, OO or not. Not only will they be better programmers for it, they'll have a larger toolkit available to solve problems with which they're presented over the course of their careers.

It's all about the trade-offs involved. There are certainly real-world situations where something like Milescript is unwarranted. At the same time, there are other situations where Java-like OO capabilities expressed in simple Java-like syntax, sharable and linkable libraries, and static typing are big boons to developer productivity and efficiency.

Which of these two alternatives apply to a given situation is up to the developer, of course :) We're pretty excited about Milescript, mostly because we've rewritten a very large JavaScript application we had awhile back in Milescript, and we were shocked at how quickly and cleanly it came together, and at the comparative ease with which we debugged it compared to how difficult it was in pure JavaScript initially. (The kinds of difficulties we had in this large app were largely the impetus for our development of Milescript a few months back.)

We'd love it if other developers felt the same, and were able to get as much benefit from it as we have. But if they don't, that's cool too. That's why we're developing it under an Apache license :)