In need of some info

[Stephen Partington]

For terminal stuff, https://asciinema.org/

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 7:02 PM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

>
> On Oct 18, 2022, at 1:21 PM, techlists at phpcoderusa.com wrote:
>
> On 2022-10-18 12:30, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>
> There’s a movement afoot to use JS as a sort of “universal
> assembly language”. The great benefit here is that unlike stuff like
> Java’s JVM, JS is far more widespread since it’s implemented in
> every web browser, although not 100% identically (even though
> standards groups are doing their best to get there).
> As such, there’s a growing base of tools that let you write code in
> a higher-level language that gets translated into JS. So why teach JS?
> Why not focus on one of the HLLs that gets compiled down into JS?
>
>
> My tutorial is for teaching beginners how to program.  I think JS might be
> the easiest entry point since all that is needed is 1) computer or laptop,
> 2) modern browser, 3) file system, and 4) text editor.
>
> Nothing to download or install unless the person taking the course does
> not have the specified browser.
>
> One can learn HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and even
> AJAX with limited tools.  For AJAX I recommend downloading one of the
> libraries to make life easier and to account for the browser differences.
>
>
>
> JS is basically interpreted ‘C’ with lots and lots of syntactical
> back-doors and often counter-intuitive idioms. As a first language to teach
> someone, I wouldn’t go near it.
>
> I can probably count the number of programming concepts that initially got
> my brain tied in a knot on one hand. To be sure, one of them was my first
> exposure to how web pages worked — mainly the fact that they were stateless
> and there was no way (at the time) to share state data from one page to the
> next other than passing it onward to the next page by passing it forward as
> querystring args. A couple of things were added to support that in most
> servers, but it’s still not obvious if you don’t know to even look for it.
> Most inexperienced programmers have no idea what “stateful” or “stateless”
> even mean, let alone having to know when to deal with it.
>
> I had been programming with Delphi for a few years at the time, and
> passing state info between forms can be easily done at several levels with
> both Delphi and Visual Studio C#/.NET. (That’s because the same guy
> designed both of them.) Prior to this, statefullness had to be managed
> manually.
>
> One HUGE chunk of programming complexity that Delphi brought to Windows
> programming at the time was that it completely hid the hideous Windows
> Event Loop, in part by presenting an “object inspector” that had two panes:
> one was a “Properties” tab that each component defined and could be edited
> right there, rather than in code; and the other was an “Events” tab where
> you merely had to double-click on a specific event and it would either: (1)
> create a prototype of the method; or (2) position the cursor to it,  within
> the editor pane, where you merely had to type in some code to respond when
> that event was called by the underlying Event Loop. What it eliminated was
> having to manually create and manage that stinking Event Loop by hand — it
> is managed entirely by code generated by the IDE. It’s still there in every
> Windows app to this day, but nobody who’s only ever used Delphi or Visual
> Studio has ever seen it.
>
> The biggest problem with most C/C++ programming (and JS as well) is the
> likelihood of making coding errors that may appear to work on the surface,
> but eventually lead to memory leaks and related errors later on. I
> understand that the relatively new language, Rust, evolved to avoid a lot
> of these potential problems. A new Linux kernal was just posted that has
> begun to replace a lot of C/C++ code with Rust code. So maybe that’s a
> better language to teach today.
>
> My point about Delphi and VS is that they have a very nice, easy-to-use
> GUI-based programming environment that implements a powerful WYSIWYG form
> designer. Microsoft has something that can be used for building web-based
> apps, but I understand it doesn’t render web widgets in the IDE as they
> would appear at run-time. And in fairness, right out of the box, Delphi
> totally sucks for web-based programming.
>
> But as a Delphi component library, WebCore bridges both of those gaps and
> presents a very nice WYSIWYG environment for building web-based apps. Some
> of the renderings look a little more accurate inside of VS Code than in the
> Delphi IDE, because Delphi is itself a Windows-based program while VS Code
> may use the Chrome rendering engine to manage its UI surface (but I’m not
> totally sure about that).
>
> On the surface of things, you can build a web app using TMS WebCore in a
> nice WYSIWYG UI environment (both Delphi and VS Code) and never have to
> touch a lick of HTML, CSS, or JS, or even know anything about the fact that
> web services are inherintly stateless — which in my mind has got to be one
> of the most significant programming advances in the past 20 years or so.
>
> As an aside, I’d like to add that I believe that web apps are the future
> of this industry because they enable you to write only ONE version of the
> app that will run anywhere you can run a browser. You can even use Electron
> or TMS’ Miletus to wrap it inside of a run-time browser simulator and run
> it as if it’s a NATIVE APP inside of virtually every major computing
> platform today.
>
> So you can create what might be called a “wire-frame mockup” in WebCore
> that’s got as much or as little functionality in it as you want, using only
> ObjectPascal. The Object Inspector lets you tweak various look-and-feel
> parameters on a per-component basis, although that’s probably not smart for
> things with lots of pages. (It may support Delphi’s Styles, tho; I don’t
> use them.)
>
> The upshot is, you can build your app out functionally and leave the
> “look-and-feel” parts to later. Then you can add CSS tags and call them out
> in specific component properties using HTML to alter their appearance and
> (some) run-time behaviors.
>
> \
> Writing stuff in a text editor to make web apps using HTML, CSS, JS, and
> layers of UI libs is so 2k-ish today. I refused to do ANY Windows
> programming until Delphi came out b/c it was the first environment that
> abstracted out enough of the nauseating Windows API that I could stomach
> writing Windows apps. To this day, I still cannot stomach writing any kind
> of rich-UI apps, including web apps, that require one to write text
> descriptions of a visual design — sometimes referred to as "declarative
> programming”.
>
> I got my fill of that with TurboVision in the early 90’s. TV was a C++
> framework for Turbo C++ that let you build text-mode GUI forms by
> describing everything in Pascal — the same way you have to create web pages
> by describing everything textually in HTML that refer indirectly to weird
> tags in CSS — two very different declarative languages that are both poorly
> suited for the task at hand.
>
> And some of us here have been around long enough to know that HTML looks
> like it was probably derived from so-called “escape sequences" used to do
> simple print enhancements on dot-matrix printers (Epson and Centronics come
> to mind).
>
> Anyway, I keep hearing there are WYSIWYG programming tools for building
> web apps, but so far I’ve seen none that are as simple to use as WebCore.
>
> I invite you to go to the TMS Software website (tmssoftware.com
> <https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=p0KgTLuGloqqO19yxeOEgrlcg-2BxifdC-2BgSGbZ5B0MlQ-3DnQDo_o-2BjQxMsWfboH-2B-2BcY2qb3IYCoqvthnvff9ftZz0pNEJ2tF1jbVlVBtrlaPYq4av3GaWT0ODeTyNjXAGj6fv6lONoOJzi60C1vWbJXK7Ht506SD1xPRBhPVT-2BxTYv-2BVJ-2Fpdiaxvcr6GF-2FYFpW5Tx2aDkc-2BbnnIc5kMqTgrPcnQ5INX1vTB-2BF5seoAzVOH7IifmjuQCB7EhLGyzpQdlq-2Fr-2F0Z534wdAOmelCgDtzNGBgZE-3D>),
> visit their blog, and check out some of the posts by Andrew where he’s
> doing a lot to bridge the gap between writing code in Pascal, some support
> code in JS, and getting the run-time version to look like it was all
> written in HTML, CSS, and JS. He posts all of the code right there in the
> articles, and you won’t have to understand much Pascal to see what’s going
> on. Aside from the one unit he ususally puts all of his local JS functions
> in, everything else is done entirely in the IDE’s property editor or within
> Event handlers in the code. It’s quite amazing.
>
> And it all gets transpiled down into JS when you “compile” it, since it’s
> using JS as the underlying assembly language. Anything “advanced” about the
> appearance of the JS code is a testament to the quality of code that the
> pas2js transpiler puts out.
>
> You don’t have to go with this, but just be aware that this is pretty much
> the current “state of the art” in this arena, AFAIK.
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>
>
>
> While I realize that most Linux folk are allergic to anything
> commercial, someone has to pay the bill for truly innovative stuff.
> Some products I’ve been working with for a long time are from a
> company called TMS Software. I work with Delphi, which was derived
> from Borland’s TurboPascal line, and TMS is one of the few premium
> component library vendors left in the market. In this case, they have
> been working on something called WebCore for a few years now that uses
> an open-source tool called pas2js to translate Delphi’s ObjectPascal
> code into JS. Their WebCore facility isn’t free, but it does work
> and run standalone inside of the Visual Studio Code environment — no
> Delphi IDE is required. It allows you to use their visual designer to
> lay out forms and write event handlers in Delphi’s ObjectPascal
> language, which is then translated into JS and packaged into a few
> files that can be uploaded to your web host and run in the web browser
> as a web app. You’ve gotta see it to believe it!
> You can see a relatively simple app I built as my first non-trivial
> test with WebCore at the following URL. It took me about an our to
> write this app.
> BestKeywordMixer.com
> <https://u2206659.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=52VrQzNhr8Wlqp-2F-2F0cHlaPHOeNiHtN4m4M8LP0BIiKmWA7lmOOoH93Oa4IUOfF0rAAvV_o-2BjQxMsWfboH-2B-2BcY2qb3IYCoqvthnvff9ftZz0pNEJ2tF1jbVlVBtrlaPYq4av3GaWT0ODeTyNjXAGj6fv6lON6G083uSD7dwA71hwCjt8hESSwKykQJjJg6p80b-2FCoZz1zkviU3DabcdvYtk28Fu8l558sDhkn93ZgZ6KxLaQv0-2FD5I1d5kV60ErNuCZ4exuDv-2F1n7QYeKj3MIHGShjZhVBTs3hjFA5nLFtLZArK7w-3D>
>  [2]
>
>
> Very interesting.  So you can create an entire web app this way?  Sounds
> like it would speed up the process. Rapid Application Development which is
> what is missing on this Interweb thingy.
>
> I took a look at the JS code and it looks very advanced.
>
>
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