Prism criticism

[Maneesh Yadav]

On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Jim Little wrote:

> Maneesh Yadav wrote:
> > 
> > The example you provide only shows how nice it'd be to write dynaimc HTML
> > in that manner.  Now tell me how does prisim help me do this?  All the fun
> > stuff like interfacing calls between the layers, parameter passing and
> > possible format conversion that you have to have setup to do the type of
> > stuff in your example (on top of all the glue that has to sit in the web
> > server), I don't see anywhere.
> 
> All of those things would be handled under the covers when the code was
> compiled.  That's the whole point -- given a sufficiently specialized
> language, a lot of things can be handled automatically by the compiler. 
> In this case, the "language" is actually two languages, but they're
> compiled into one program.  The compiler takes care of the gluing the
> two languages together.
> 
> > Nor do I see how Prism helps me write the above routines.
> 
> It's true that each of these little languages has to be written by
> somebody, as must be the individual compilation routines.  But it's like
> a library... once a mini-language and compiler have been written,
> anybody can use them, saving everybody a lot of time.
> 
> My eventual goal is for the mini-languages and mini-compilers to
> interoperate.  That's what all the different pieces of Prism are for. 
> The meta-metamodel provides a standard format for program models.  The
> global heap provides a place for the different parts of the model to
> reside.  And the interpreter provides a compilation engine.

The hard part to get all these languages to communicate is to setup up the
details of the communication channels between them.  I still don't see how
your Prism syntax fits into this idea of tonnes of mini languages.  And
how much time would you save, the obvious problem is that if I am doing an
application that combines graphics and database searching, I don't want to
have to learn a new language for each.  That is a problem today, too many
languages each with just a slightly syntacically different way of doing
the exact same semantic thing...would your proposal not make it worse?
 > 
> At this point, I'm still researching how to make everything
> interoperate, so don't ask me how I'll do that -- I don't know yet!  :) 
> But the infrastructure is in place.
> 
> Jim
> 
> Prism is at http://www.teleport.com/~sphere
>