Monday September 13, 2021; 9:28 AM EDT
- Right now the language in Drummer doesn't have a name, and that's starting to be a problem. #
- The language is an extended JavaScript. It does one very important thing that JavaScript doesn't, it generates code that makes synchronization automatic.#
- The resulting code is so natural, a few people don't even notice it, and that's a good thing. #
- With Frontier we more or less punted on the name of the language. We hired a writer, Dan Shafer, to write the docs, and he couldn't do it without a name for the language. The programmers were busy working on other things, so I told him to just pick a name and go with it, thinking there would be a moment when we could change it if we came up with something better. We didn't. The name he came up with was UserTalk. I hated that name. It means nothing, and it's a lie. Programming isn't for people we think of as users. It's almost a definition of what a user is, someone who doesn't program. #
- This language is far from the only language that generates JavaScript code. Because of its ubiquity, lots of language developers take the route of generating JavaScript code from their language compiler. Here's a post about pre-processing for JavaScript. #
- Here's some of my thinking about names --#
- Cmd-/ -- pronouced "command slash." Because that's how you run scripts in the outliner. I have a domain reserved for this. #
- javascriptscript -- imho javascript is not a scripting language at all, it's a system language. Like C, Pascal, other algol-like languages. The thing that prevents it from being a scripting language is the thing that this language adds. #
- DrummerScript or DrummerTalk or something with Drummer in its name. I like the idea of binding the name to the outliner. Even though you hardly notice it when programming in Drummer, the fact that the default editor for the language is an outliner is pretty innovative (for most people, in Frontier we were doing it a depressingly long time ago).#
- Or none of these, something altogether different. #
- Bonus link, from 2003, How to name a product. #