Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/1olSGHv. Gilad Bracha keynotes on what's keeping web technologies from being on par with their native counterparts. Filmed at qconnewyork.com. Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google where he works on Dart. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages.

1. Whither Web
Programming
Gilad Bracha
Google

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Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations
/web-programming-future

3. Presented at QCon New York
www.qconnewyork.com
Purpose of QCon
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knowledge and innovation
Strategy
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Highlights
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- held in 9 cities worldwide

4. I am not speaking for Google here.
Caveat

5. Ubiquity
Zero-install
Web Platform Strengths

6. Always Available
Web Platform Strengths

7. Always Available
Always Up to Date
Web Platform Strengths

8. Ask xkcd:

9. Always Available
- except when it’s not
Caveat Emptor

10. Offline use
● Network may be flakey, slow, costly or
non-existent
● Lacking a good mechanism for storing
programs
Web Platform Weaknesses

11. Restricted choice of viable programming
languages
● Hard to implement alternative
languages efficiently
o Lacking necessary primitives
o Lacking a good mechanism for storing
programs (again!)
Web Platform Weaknesses

13. Integers
Stack Access
Weak References/Weak Arrays
Object Privacy
Concurrency
Programming Language Issues

14. The web platform has another strength:
Openness
Let there be Hope

15. Openness leads to diversity
People are doing cool language work
against the odds.
Let there be Hope

17. A playground for Dart programming,
including a full Dart compiler running in the
browser
Try Dart

18. So, why is this
book not out
yet?

19. So, why is this
book not out
yet?
Because the
reflection
chapter isn’t
ready

20. Why?

21. Why?
Because the
reflection API is
not stable

22. Why?

23. Why? Because the
reflection makes
dart2js output
larger

24. Why is that a
problem?

25. Why is that a
problem? Because the
web lacks a
standard way of
storing
programs

26. A pure functional language for UI
construction. Runs on the web, with a live
environment.
import Mouse
import Graphics.Collage
redCircle x = collage 200 300 [filled red (circle (toFloat x))]
main = lift redCircle Mouse.x
Elm

27. Could the web be nicer to Elm?
● Concurrency
● Tail recursion
Elm

28. A live environment for the web
Lively

29. A purely functional, lazy, dynamically typed
homoiconic language with a live web-based
literate programming environment
Leisure

30. A live, modular, object-capability based
platform for the networked age
Newspeak

31. The unmet goal: Code & data
Sync’ed by Available
the platform offline.
when online.
Platform for the Networked Age?

32. Changing a mixin at runtime means changing
all classes that mix it in
Keep list of said classes in a weak array or
weak map
JS weak maps are not enumerable :-(
LIve Code Editing + Mixins

33. Motivation:
● IDE’s own debugger
● First class control constructs
● Serializing a thread
● To be continued ...
Manipulating the Stack

34. ● Web apps should evolve to compete and
surpass native apps
● Web platform must support offline work,
stored programs, many programming
languages - or wither in the face of
competition
Whither Web Programming?

35. TryDart: Peter Ahe & the Dart team
Elm: Evan Czaplicki
Lively Kernel: Dan Ingalls & Robert Krahn
Leisure: Bill Burdick
Newspeak: Ryan Macnak, Vassili Bykov &
others
Credits

36. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0
License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the
file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you
distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license.
Cartoon on slide 6: xkcd
Dart book copyright Addison-Wesley 2013
The Newspeak eye on slide 28 was designed by Victoria Bracha and
used by permission
Licensing and Attribution

37. Watch the video with slide synchronization on
InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/web-
programming-future