For the first ime I’m landing on you web page. I was subscribed to you video cast through Miro , and watch your episodes for abour 2 months. This was around may / june 2008. Honestly, I couldn’t stand much seeing a young man doing lots of thing and finally not very much in the end. I mean the content was rather poor for me (even if I kept watching iEye…). After a while I simply unsubscribed.

Only today, your feed reappaerd as a featured channel on Miro. I click on your website this time and my jaw just fall on the ground…. O_O

Well… This is the first time I’m reading your post and it’s obvious you have a lot to say about technology and you even know how to argument. It’s really surprising for me to see that some one like you is doing video I find really poor in content, but who is able to write deep, thought essays ! You definitely have something into writing. It’s even obvious !

When I read your last article “I’d like to take this opportunity to abandon my usual spaz-tastic personality and become a little bit more sophisticatified” : the “a little more” is quite huge and when I look at past posts, you seem to be really often “sophisticated” To be honest I would have been really happy to see this on iEye ! If you add this kind of richness in your video, you will have a very informative and powerfull video podcast. And for a 14 years old guy, that’s pretty rare !

Well, well… I’m still under shock (more or less) to see 2 different Keaton : one “little dummy” agitated kid in front of the camera, and one geek who knows what he is talking about ! What can I say : Keep going writing, you definitively have skills and passion to know what you’re talking about. But try to add more content in your video. Teens doing stuff on video are plenty. Teens doing good video with content (and lot of crazyness) aren’t…

It’s not a bad critic from me.. Just I just discover a hidden side of someone I thought was “just” another teen Hope to see a change once in a while :p

Take care,

Olivier

So, most of that made sense. Just two things:

* I still don’t get the Alert statement. It messes up all conventions you’re proposing. In JavaScript, one calls an alert with alert(’Hello’).

* Depending on how lazy the programmer is, most classes in most languages can be instantiated the way you’re demonstrating. Similarly, though, if you want to change the text after you instantiate the object, how would you do that? Or if you wanted to, say, get the value of the new Text object’s Size attribute?

Might I suggest you allow one to assign an object to a variable, regardless of whether or not you prefer they instantiate a specific way?

As for the examples of individually changing attribute values, you should allow doing that, too.

Although it may seem less coherent at first blush, for anyone who’s worked with a programming language in the past, this will make working with CodeArt much easier.

We should speak at some point so we can go over all of your conventions and make sure that they are relevant and realistic.

Ben

So yeah, the first line is the typical javascript variable initiator. The second line is just a very simple way to call an alert, again, just like in JavaScript. Now, I suppose you’re wondering why the New thing is different from the Var thing. Well, I decided if I went the traditional route of using variables for objects wouldn’t work all that well for what I’m doing. If I understand correctly, this would be the code for the traditional way:

Var t1:TextObject
t1.X = 100
t1.Y = 100
t1.Text = “Text”
t1.Size = 32

My way requires only one line to achieve the same result. This might be a stupid way of doing it, but I feel that it is more convenient and also more beginner friendly.

Ok, another thing about my language is that capitalization really doesn’t matter. I just can’t think of any situation where a capitalized word and an un-capitalized word would be different. I know that’s not how JavaScript does it, but again, this isn’t supposed to comply with ECMA standards or anything, it’s just supposed to be easy and convenient.

Okay, now the part that still confuses me, object oriented-ness. So, I’m mostly referring to the fact that you can create text objects and picture objects and stuff, but I think that I will also include the ability to make your own classes, and probably inheritance and all that in there. It will also have functions (sub-routines, sub-classes, whatever you wanna call them), if that counts as object orientation. As for the built in classes inheriting from one object, they do, at least in the interpreter, I don’t know if that will affect naming conventions or anything the user really sees.

And finally, I think, the language will be (if I understand correctly) strongly typed, again, unlike javascipt. Yes, the string function turns integers, colors, and booleans into strings. There will also be val, col, and bool functions. As for memory management, well, ok, I admit it, I’m still using REALbasic, and that takes care of all of the memory stuff.

Hopefully that was an adequate answer, some of this stuff still confuses me, so I may have just written complete nonsense :p

Just wondering if you could give a little bit of insight into the programming language itself?

That code makes absolutely no sense. You’re mixing syntax styles.

ECMAScript (JavaScript and its derivatives including ActionScript) use the colon to type something:

var myInt:int = 4;

C-like languages (C, C++, C#, Java, D, etc.) have a simple space, like your third line of code where you instantiate an object of type Text.

What is your second line, exactly? Does that instantiate a new object of type Alert, or is that a built-in function for easing the creation of new Alert objects? Whichever one, doesn’t that style conflict with your third line of code, where you call the instantiation method for type Text with parentheses?

Similarly, how does this first character capitalization work? If I was to use the New keyword some place where it’s not located at the beginning of a statement, does it remain capitalized?

Is this language not going to have a clear statement end character, like most popular languages save Python and Ruby do (mostly ;)? If not, how do you determine between a new statement and one that is continuing from the previous line? Python and Ruby do this with required indentation standards.

How far do you plan to support object orientation? Inheritance? Multiple inheritance? Interfaces? Multiple interface implementations for one object? Will all built-in classes inherit from one core object (normally aptly-named Object, NSObject, etc.), like most OO languages do?

I assume since you’ll be throwing exceptions, you’ll have try/catch statements?

Also, how strict will your interpreter be about typing? I see you have written a built-in function Str() which takes (I would imagine) any object type and converts it to a string.

So I assume each type will be allotted the correct amount of bits and Str() will be able to manipulate the amount of bits allotted to whatever is passed to it and will return the newly-modified object?

Basically…your language structure so far seems like a convoluted mess. And I’m not trying to be mean; as someone who would like to see and play with this application myself, of course I wish only the best. Perhaps pick a language to be influenced by (a good choice would be C++ or Python; a bad choice would be PHP due to its lack of common structure or Objective-C due to its quirkiness), and follow all the syntax conventions that you see fit for CodeArt’s language.

If you are ever interested in advice about this language’s structure, please do contact me so I can be of any assistance possible — ben at squishsoftware pound com.

Also, The world needs a good-looking, non-AIR, non-twitterrific, killer twitter application…

But ok, this is sort of an idea competition, which one(s) do you MOST want to see made?