Comments on: The next high level language http://yanpritzker.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/ photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:00:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: igor http://yanpritzker.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/comment-page-1/#comment-11123 igor Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:13:41 +0000 http://skwpspace.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/#comment-11123 You're thinking semantic web, I think. You’re thinking semantic web, I think.

]]> By: Yan http://yanpritzker.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/comment-page-1/#comment-11120 Yan Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:01:51 +0000 http://skwpspace.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/#comment-11120 Standards may not ever be perfect but hey we all agreed to some extent on what html, xml, and css mean...why can't we do the same for a standard set of 'social services', at least to a basic extent. OpenSocial is a big step in that direction and is already seeing some uptake by major companies. I think it could be the building block of a service-agnostic social platform. Standards may not ever be perfect but hey we all agreed to some extent on what html, xml, and css mean…why can’t we do the same for a standard set of ’social services’, at least to a basic extent. OpenSocial is a big step in that direction and is already seeing some uptake by major companies. I think it could be the building block of a service-agnostic social platform.

]]> By: Yan http://yanpritzker.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/comment-page-1/#comment-11119 Yan Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:58:21 +0000 http://skwpspace.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/#comment-11119 You're absolutely right. As I said the pseudocode I wrote is even possible in Ruby today (or any other language for that matter plus or minus some syntactical ugliness). It's really about the implementation. We could write a library on top of every api out there to make them look and feel the same, but what I'm imagining is the level of dynamism we have in Ruby today with objects, having that across web apis. So instead of object.respond_to?(:to_s) I would be able to say friend_service.respond_to?(:friends_by_location). Then you can imagine API's that can be implemented by multiple services. So friend_service could be facebook or myspace, or any new service that comes out tomorrow that implements the same api. For example both Facebook and Planypus would implement a friends_by_location api supporting some standard (FOAF-style for example). You’re absolutely right. As I said the pseudocode I wrote is even possible in Ruby today (or any other language for that matter plus or minus some syntactical ugliness). It’s really about the implementation. We could write a library on top of every api out there to make them look and feel the same, but what I’m imagining is the level of dynamism we have in Ruby today with objects, having that across web apis.

So instead of object.respond_to?(:to_s) I would be able to say friend_service.respond_to?(:friends_by_location). Then you can imagine API’s that can be implemented by multiple services. So friend_service could be facebook or myspace, or any new service that comes out tomorrow that implements the same api. For example both Facebook and Planypus would implement a friends_by_location api supporting some standard (FOAF-style for example).

]]> By: ...Paul http://yanpritzker.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/comment-page-1/#comment-11118 ...Paul Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:39:01 +0000 http://skwpspace.com/2008/03/27/the-next-high-level-language/#comment-11118 You really don't need a new language to make that happen. Do it in Ruby/Ruby-on-Rails, as an extension. The real problem is simple -- there's no way to really make different web services consistent, so your implementation is always going to have to specify the resource. What you'd really like to be able to do in a language is reference something like "Friends.list" and have the language not care if the friends list is being drawn from Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn or whatever -- your app would simply be able to invisibly get access to the data you need, and the data would be in some consistent format. Reality, of course, is that doesn't happen, and will likely never really happen unless everyone really gloms on to open standards. But open standards aren't even consistent, and implementations rarely are. So you'll need to write special code to know that if your friends are on Livejournal, they might belong to separate groups, while on LinkedIn, it's just one big friends list. If your app is going to do something with group logic, it has to know that the source may not support it. And, of course, one would really like to treat all the different services as an invisible cloud, so that if I accees "My.friends", I'd get a comprehensive list from *all* services, not just one. ...Paul You really don’t need a new language to make that happen. Do it in Ruby/Ruby-on-Rails, as an extension.

The real problem is simple — there’s no way to really make different web services consistent, so your implementation is always going to have to specify the resource. What you’d really like to be able to do in a language is reference something like “Friends.list” and have the language not care if the friends list is being drawn from Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn or whatever — your app would simply be able to invisibly get access to the data you need, and the data would be in some consistent format.

Reality, of course, is that doesn’t happen, and will likely never really happen unless everyone really gloms on to open standards. But open standards aren’t even consistent, and implementations rarely are. So you’ll need to write special code to know that if your friends are on Livejournal, they might belong to separate groups, while on LinkedIn, it’s just one big friends list. If your app is going to do something with group logic, it has to know that the source may not support it.

And, of course, one would really like to treat all the different services as an invisible cloud, so that if I accees “My.friends”, I’d get a comprehensive list from *all* services, not just one.

…Paul

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