E2E: Donna Malayeri, Gilad Bracha, Luke Hoban - Web Programming and More

The Discussion

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  yep, we should be able to cast an object to an interface if it actually implements the methods, this is useful, its still checked at compile time and still static, so safety is not lost.

  explicitly declaring a class implementing an interface is useful for checking when developing a library without consuming code, but it could be optional, right ?

  Isnt NoPIA doing a similiar thing ?

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  Golden comment by Gilad: "there are conferences for those papers".

  Golden comment by Erik: "did you get a package from Amsterdam?".

  Great idea by Erik towards the end. Isn't that sort of also what Links was invented for?

  Not using Dart yet but probably will include it in the existing arsenal of Js+Jq, C# and F#.

  Great interview

   

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  Regarding Erik's remark at the end: With explicit state management you can easily check the state of a phone call in the database. But if you try to inspect a serialized continuation you would see something like a line number and a stack trace. That may be great for debugging but it could make it harder to tweak the code or database before the operation terminates. The current trend in web development is to be very explicit about state. But maybe we're pushing it too far, I don't know.

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  Scala has delimited contintuations (shift / reset keywords) where you can bracket some state that is relevant for your computation and do something with it (save/restore/ship to another location, etc). A stateful web framework could leverage that well, although I don't know of any that does.

  Also, one of the useful F# features  is metaprogramming using computation expressions that provides language extensibility (this is like C++ or LISP macros but not exactly). Donna talks about that at around the 45 minute mark. One of the products that leverages it well is WebSharper (http://websharper.com) for generating client side javascript from F# code.