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Re: What if JavaScript had persistent globals?

In a recent piece on his blog Dave Winer imagines what might have been had his ideas for persistent global variables in his Frontier development environment been copied into JavaScript. I find this a fascinating thought. It could have radically changed the way the local web app development evolved.

For me, Frontier’s Object Database was the most compelling of all the things in Frontier. I never really go into the language or the outliner parts of his work, but the Object Database was clearly a good idea. So much so that I’ve been trying to figure out ways of incorporating it into AppleScript ever since. Products like ScriptBase tried, but none of us have been able to achieve the integration that Dave did.

The closest I came was with FaceSpan 5 where the entire UI and application were entries in a hierarchical object database, and event handling flowed up through the object tree from the source (e.g. a button) to the root (the application). Everything was mutable and persistent which made for a hugely powerful tool, much as Frontier had demonstrated many years before. Sadly, FaceSpan 5 was never finished.

One Comment

  1. has has
    Dave Winer imagines what might have been had his ideas for persistent global variables in his Frontier development environment been copied into JavaScript

    His?” <cough> I think Alan Kay just called.

    Mind you, considering what a hideously broken mess of unspeakably insecure incompetence the entire WWW already is, I suspect we all dodged at least one major bullet there.

    Though to be completely fair, while ST/UT/AS-style persistence might have been much more user-friendly than the Unix-y status quo**, I suspect they were never really designed with industrial-strength security in mind; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and a whole universe away from today’s ubiquitously networked Internets world of endless Facebooks and Googles, surveillance states, Russian mafias, and Nchan trolls as far as the digital eye can see.

    ** Not that Unix is truly secure either, mind you – certainly not for regular consumers, or anyone else not already deeply schooled in system hardening – but at least in principle it’s not totally pants-down either. (And best not mention all the “Secure OSes” the Linuxverse keeps inventing atop its 20MLOC monokernel…)

    p.s. Best wishes for 2016!

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