Is there a high-level language for the web?

Question

Preamble

To build dynamic web-sites, we to master at least four languages:

• HTML for the structure of web pages
• CSS for layout and design
• JavaScript for interactivity
• A language for business rules or dynamic driven data

In addition, there's SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs for the many different content management systems. We should also consider interacting with OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial in building a web application, for it to be interesting.

All in all, it's an utter mess!

If you take into account two objectives:

• Teaching web development to kids
• Staying productive as a team

Question

What high level systems exist that unify HTML + CSS + Javascript + (Insert High Level Language here, PHP preferred)?

---

Background

1. I am a software engineer with 15+ years of experience as project lead and developer with technologies like Broadvision, Autonomy, Enterprise Java, and Oracle.

During recent years, I have focused on the developing community websites, using Drupal or PHP frameworks such as CakePHP. I like web development and enjoy the impedance mismatch between the technologies involved. Still the inevitable conclusion I come to is there must be a better way.

1. I am the father of two sons (13 and 9), and while I don't want them to become programmers I would like them to comprehend computers as more than gaming machines. I like to motivate them to tinker a bit with web development to express themselves.

Whenever I show them bits and pieces, I would love for them to have a toolset that allows them to create "interesting" results in an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon.

Answer 1

The closest I think you'll get is .NET. There are many frameworks for many languages, but none that I know of that handle absolutely everything. Beside that you must not attempt to convince children that programming is a walk in the park. It's a difficult career, that requires a lot of study and keeping-up. We work with technologies that are here today, and gone tomorrow.

If you think about it, programming isn't any different than carpentry, or aeronautics. Just about any profession you chose will require you to learn a lot of different things to be better at what you do.

Answer 2

How is one supposed to teach web development to kids?

An army of kids in web development is what has degraded our profession since now just about anyone calls himself a programmer while it's getting harder and harder for us to get distanced from them and get decent pay.

Many languages and technologies to master? It's a good thing. Let there be some entry barrier to join the ranks of developers.

ADDED: By following comments I can see I have not made myself entirely clear. I say nothing about the age, be it 10, 30, 50 or 80. It's all about attitude. Whether a person understands and accepts the fact that there is much more to the profession than moving controls with a mouse in some designer or CMS. There is a lot of knowledge to be gained, including basics of CS, algorithms, data structures, databases, architecture, extensibility, maintenance, performance, scalability, usability, marketing and much more that belong to the workshop of a professional software developer. I a person is ignorant of those and doesn't make a move to educate themselves and strive to become more and more proficient, they do not belong to the profession. And let this opinion be biased.

Answer 3

GWT goes someway towards being a high level toolkit, letting you write Java to produce Javascript.

Answer 4

Web programming is an inherently multi-discipline craft.

The primary reason for this is because of seperation of concerns...the reason that HTML and CSS and JavaScript, SQL, etc, are not mashed together in one language is because they each have seperate goals, caveats, pitfalls, and strengths.

Can you imagine trying to debug a site that has SQL, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code mixed together in the same source files? You may have already had the misfortune of doing so. Sadly, there are literally thousands of sites written like this, and it is a complete nightmare trying to debug or add to such messy amalgamations of presentation, data, and structure.

All in all, an utter mess! How is one supposed to teach web development to kids?

I think the most important thing is teaching the fundamentals of programming and making them stick. Variables, logic, pointers, memory management, algorithms, data structures, etc.

When you have the fundamentals of programming, it's easy to work in multipe languages, pick up new ones, and easy to change with the times. This is an invaluable skill for something as constantly-evolving and trend-based as web programming.

In my opinion people new to programming should be started at lower level languages, like C for example. People should be tought the intrinsic, fundamental concepts of programming and should gain knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes before even being shown a higher level language like PHP or Python.

I think that this attitude towards teaching programming will have the effect of breeding better web developers as well as providing a barrier of entry that will weed out people that don't have the interest or intelligence. I think the result of this type of attitude will be better developers, better software, and ultimately more powerful languages and tools.

Answer 5

I think the problem with web development is that it was not originally designed for what it is used today. We build rich client applications inside a browser with HTML+CSS+JavaScript plus whatever serverside technology generates it. Yes, it works, but it's a pain, especially with those annoying browser incompatibilites. The existence of Flash and Silverlight proves this. They let you build your app with one single technology, still inside the browser. The downsides of needing a plugin for your content is obvious though.

Answer 6

Many technologies to master is not a good thing. We need a Visual Basic for the web, no matter what the elitists say.

Answer 7

Software industry is suffering from unqualified individuals doing nothing but creating poor quality products and at the same time distancing this profession from becoming a true engineering discipline. This isn't something to get certified on. For the love of god, don't 'teach' anyone software development. Explain to them that making great software only comes out as a result of years of experience and wealth of knowledge of past and current technologies. The worst you can do is introduce yet another half-baked developer creating work for others working with them. Tell them to get educated. I know this isn't the answer you probably wanted to hear, but I wanted this to be read.

Answer 8

The languages are the least of your worries. It's the problem domain that they work with that is complex. Using different languages actually makes things more manageable because a) It makes the boundaries explicit and b) the languages can be optimised for the domain.

Answer 9

Programming (PHP/JS) and document format (HTML/CSS) are 2 different things. Learning to program in PHP and JS at the same time will also be difficult.

You should focus on HTML and JS on the client at start. You could then let them program javascript on the server as well. This will make it only one programming language, and focus on HTML over CSS to start with.

Once they've learned the basics of JS and HTML, you can teach them a more widely used server side programming language (like PHP, Ruby, etc) and CSS.

Answer 10

You need different languages for different purposes. In most web applications there's actually quite a bit going on, so you need the different languages and solutions.

If the goal is to unify on a single language, you can do that. You can use Javascript on the server, and then build the pages using document.createElement() and apply styles to them directly to the styles property. And on the server, store your data directly in files with Javascript.

Obviously this wouldn't work out that well. HTML is not perfect, but there is a reason it is so ubiquitous-- it does what it does simply and well. CSS is both convoluted and too simplistic, but the underlying idea of defining overrideable rules to express your design is sound. And SQL may be a pain to understand at times, but expressing database queries this way is expressive and actually works pretty well.

That being said, I'm not saying there is or should be one architecture. There shouldn't be. Each project should use an architecture in line with its requirements.

On your next project try to simplify: do you really need a database? Can you combine the view layers to simplify, either using something like GWT, Applets, Flash or .NET? Do you really need to serve up your content in a browser (which introduces CSS, HTML and Javascript complexities), or can you just write an application?

Answer 11

How are you supposed to teach web development to kids? Wow, that's a thorny one. How does one go about teaching them surgery, or intellectual property law, or civil engineering? Or for that matter auto mechanics, or plumbing, or general contracting?

Have you thought about popping in a Sesame Street tape?

Elmo doesn't like it when you trivialize his profession.

Answer 12

Django can take you part of the way through its cleanness. It is focused around productivity. Teaching is not easier than any other language/framework, but look at it this way: when taught this tool, your students are well equipped in their knowledge of how easy it should be. They will never accept Java servelets or similar nightmares after having learnt Django.

Answer 13

Hi Olav,

I think your approach might need to be rethought. Take this for what it is, my opinion, but I would think this ordering might work better.

Top Priorities: (no particular order)

• Develop problem solving skills
• Be productive as a team

Next:

• Basic Programming skills (PHP, Python, etc)

After they know how to solve problems as individuals and as a team they can move onto specifics such as:

• Client/Server model
• Markup (HTML, XHTML, XML, etc)
• Styling (CSS)
• Client-side scripting (JavaScript / jQuery)
• Server-side scripting (PHP, Ruby, etc)

Build up their knowledge of what's involved piece by piece rather than jumping into the deep end off the bat - they'll be quickly overwhelmed.

At this point you can start to introduce things like file I/O and databases.

This will give them a fairly comprehensive skill-set. From here they can really start learning.

In addition, one may have to deal with SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs of content management systems, OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial etc. to build anything interesting.

These are whole topics unto themselves, you can't bite them off all in one chunk. Especially if you're taking these people from 0. Before you can build something interesting you have to learn to build something mundane.

HTML5 will probably be more in the vein of what you're looking rather than Flash or Silverlight but it's not quite here yet...Though support is building.

Baby steps, Olav - if this were The Matrix you could download all that info in one shot but we're not there...yet ;-)

For the moment, and near future, web development is the synergy of many different technologies working together to deliver an interesting user experience.

Well, that's my 2 cents

Answer 14

"Links is a new programming language designed to make web programming easier. . . Links eases the impedance mismatch problem by providing a single language for all three tiers. The system generates code for each tier; for instance, translating some code into Javascript for the browser, some into a bytecode for the server, and some into SQL for the database."

At first I wasn't going to post this, since it's a research project, not a production system; but all these answers saying "that's how it is, deal with it" begged for a counterexample.

Answer 15

The multi disciplinary nature of web development is one of the things that makes it a joy to work in, especially in a team environment.

To work well as a team, you naturally come together with a group of people with a range of expertise, from UI/graphics people down to DBAs and sys admins. Even within a single layer of the group (for example back end programmers) each person generally specialises in a different set, for example some people may have more experience up towards UI, others down towards data.

I would take this variety any day, compared to working in a room of 10 java programmers all working on some middleware application.

Answer 16

If you simply want to teach them to write dynamic websites, set them going through the HTML tutorial on w3schools.com and once they're done, find yourself a decent looking stylesheet that they can include and set them going with PHP. That'll get them up and running as a hobby, and if they want to do more, they can start piecing together extra knowledge, like CSS and JavaScript.

Answer 17

Ruby on Rails goes quite a way towards unifying all of those, but for CSS it leaves you out in the cold (though there are probably a few frameworks for RoR that make CSS obsolete, but then you have another markup language, I think), and you still need Javascript (though it does write a lot of Javascript for you, and all DB code).

On the other hand, about your kids: programming is for programmers. On a Sunday afternoon to put something together in a few hours, you would need to know a framework, and buy some plugins, and get everything up and moving without much work. Something like Drupal or Joomla, where they sell templates (for Joomla you can buy packs of hundreds) and plugins to do all kinds of things. And when that fails, your kids should probably know how to go on ODesk and drop $100 to get something done on your framework. Learning to programming is good if you want to be a programmer. Otherwise, it's best to learn what you need to hire good programmers or buy good predone components, and have the cash to do it.

Last point about the kids: let them play video games. That is the best training that they can get for whatever the future holds in store on the computer side. Video games let you investigate, play, and relax with the computer. Once you have that, learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and some application stack is cake.