[ANN] WebCharm Free v1.1 released

[Bruce Lewis]

Language? What language? Why are you still writing code?

Here is a complete list of ingredients for a programming language:

1. literals
2. variable substitution
3. procedure calls
4. procedure creation
5. conditionals
6. variable mutation

A lot of the functional programming community would question whether
that sixth one is necessary, but I'll leave it there so nobody can say
I'm skimping.

Any system that allows you to create a template has procedure creation.
If you can call a template from another template, you have procedure
calls. Any decent template system has variable substitution and
conditionals. WebCharm's @topic tag implements variables and
conditionals. Literals are hard to avoid. What do you call the
non-dynamic parts of the template? Many WebCharm tags have numeric
literals.

That leaves us with just one (questionable) ingredient: variable
mutation. I think it wouldn't take a lot of creativity to use
WebCharm's @qsvalue tag to mutate variables from one query to the next.
So there you have it, a Turing-complete programming language.

If you surprise me by actually gaining a user base for WebCharm, you'll
start getting "How do I..." questions that will drive you to add
features. The fact that WebCharm is itself a programming language will
be increasingly obvious. That's how PHP evolved.

 

[Long]

:
: > Language? What language? Why are you still writing code?
:
: Here is a complete list of ingredients for a programming language:
:
: 1. literals
: 2. variable substitution
: 3. procedure calls
: 4. procedure creation
: 5. conditionals
: 6. variable mutation
:
: A lot of the functional programming community would question whether
: that sixth one is necessary, but I'll leave it there so nobody can say
: I'm skimping.
:
: Any system that allows you to create a template has procedure creation.
: If you can call a template from another template, you have procedure
: calls. Any decent template system has variable substitution and
: conditionals. WebCharm's @topic tag implements variables and
: conditionals. Literals are hard to avoid. What do you call the
: non-dynamic parts of the template? Many WebCharm tags have numeric
: literals.
:
: That leaves us with just one (questionable) ingredient: variable
: mutation. I think it wouldn't take a lot of creativity to use
: WebCharm's @qsvalue tag to mutate variables from one query to the next.
: So there you have it, a Turing-complete programming language.
:
While I will agree there must be some construct to "program" a desired
feature in any software system. I wouldn't go as far to classify WebCharm
tags the same as a formal programming language.

One does not program (in the traditional sense) with WebCharm since
it currently does not have a scripting language (like BRL, Perl or Python).
Instead, "programming" is mainly characterized by configuring preprogrammed
tags.

WebCharm is intended to be used by people in general, not just programmers.
Hence, the traditional programming aspect is left out on purpose. The good news
is advanced users can still add features using existing scripting languages (JavaScript,
CGI). For example, form data processing.

: If you surprise me by actually gaining a user base for WebCharm, you'll
: start getting "How do I..." questions that will drive you to add
: features. The fact that WebCharm is itself a programming language will
: be increasingly obvious. That's how PHP evolved.
:
That is the eventual goal, but as you are aware there are many obstacles to
overcome. To some degree we are all resistant to change, especially to something
that is not obvious (like a 50" plasma TV .

The process will be slow, but we do have indication of good interests base
on the number of download hits with version 1.1.

Long
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