The lost Beautiful Programming Language

It was old time when a new programming language comes out, trying to be the best of all existing languages, designed by a Guru, aiming too fill a hole, etc. I think the last one was Java. Today when we see what a developer can do with an IDE like eclipse on Java, we really wonder what will the next language be and how can it be better.

However this is not taking account what mankind can do for its own loss. When we can't do better, we do worse.

The web pressure made plenty of "web" languages pop up in the landscape. One of them, Flex, looks very popular. But after playing with it, it becomes clear to me that Flex is backtracking.

Flex comes with Flex builder, a plugin on eclipse. However, the integration in eclipse is very minimal. No refactoring, no code assist, no automatic indentation, complex project settings. Only the editor, the debugger, a profiler, and the expensive wysiwyg designer that generates xml are available. I'm not sure it worths the 400M of my RAM the flex builder is eating. All in all, I miss Java support in Eclipse.

But IDE support is not all. Flex syntax is confusing, especially when it mixes xml and ActionScript. Even the semantic is misleading. Let's take an example:

  var t:Object = { foo:bar } ;

The right hand part creates an object, actually an "association list". It contains a property of type key/value, where key is "foo" and value is "bar". "foo" is a String literal, but "bar" is supposed to be an object. The value is stored in the association list, but is eventually converted to a string. To use it:

  t.foo ;
  // or
  t["foo"] ;

Note the very unusual use of "." and "[ ]". Anyway, this construct is very handy. Basically, an association list is an hashtable.


I let you imagine how much time it needs to figure out this simple feature from the documentation, and how error-prone can be a language with plenty of this kind of counter-intuitive syntax. I know, this is common with scripting language. But can we still speak about scripting languages when it has packages and an object-oriented layer?

So yes, Flex is the royal language for RIA, but no, it's not as slick as Java.