why those books? discussions with friends

Edward Angel. OpenGL(tm): a Primer. ISBN 0-201-74186-5 A fascination with NeuroScience and displaying 3d graphics, ideally in a web browser. Unfortunately, we are missing a Canvas3D that supports this stuff. For the moment, there are Java bindings, and lwjgl looks like the way to go.

David Flanagan. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition. ISBN 0-596-00048-0 Actually I don't remember why that book is here, I get all the info I want from the net.

John C. Mitchell. Foundations for Programming Languages. ISBN 0-262-13321-0The style and notation of this book are of a beauty that makes me want to read it over and over again. Although I don't really have spare cycles to do more foundational stuff, the proofs are spelled out in a very clear, yet concise manner and it is inspiring.

Benjamin Pierce, ed. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages. ISBN 0-262-16228-8 Here, I started with the chapter of typed assembly language, also with an implementation actually. Wouldn't it be useful to have a low-level VM for iron that interprets typed assembly code? and have an x86 backend at some point.

When chatting with my chap about my final project, I was surprised how rational I could tell him the objectives and problems that I am facing, things I have been trying to find out for a long time. And there I am just communicating it as if I had known it all the time. My reluctance to use *the language*, the advantages of using HTML for user interfaces, the insights into GWT and the architectural sketch and constraints of the system.

When receiving another chap's email I'm surprised at his argument for dynamic typing having become more differentiated, preferring LISP over Python. And it somehow makes sense, because uniform containers (like sequences and hashtables) seems to be what most of my obsession with iron is about as well. His CLOS speak is beyond me but I recall from the book that I forgot to mention that setting up some object system in those languages is not very difficult.

Abelson and Sussman. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. ISBN 0-262-51087-1 Never made it to those later chapters, where writing a scheme compiler is given as an exercise. Opening this book again is due to my interest in doing dynamic typing via tags. However it just clashes with the idea of doing static checking for regular expression types. What gives? There should be some program analysis and type inference.

Benjamin Pierce. Types and Programming Languages. ISBN 0-262-16209-1 There's something about recursive types that makes me return to this book. It stems from my obsession of regular expression types for sequences. The iron language is supposed to have sequences as primitives, and do some type-checking for an xsd-extension based object-class system. Also, the type inference idea mentioned above can be nourished from this book.

forging templates Google style

Well, not surprisingly Google have their own way of templatin.

forging hypertext templates

The good old hypertext. What have they done to you, pal? Just look at you. JSPed all over. And all those taglibs hanging down your front.

<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/tld/struts-bean.tld" prefix="bean" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/tld/struts-html.tld" prefix="html" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/tld/struts-logic.tld" prefix="logic" %>
<!--Logon_Block_Start-->
<html:form action="/loginlogout/login" focus="username">
  <TABLE WIDTH="<bean:message key="block.size.x"/>" 
   ...

No, no, some other I may have done this to you myself a long time ago, but not again.
Joel is right, so facade elements with attributes and ognl and tapestry style it shall be.

editable, viewable, maybe even validatable and bindable. No use to go over the top with WebObjects.

so you want to get web programming right, eh?

Programming should be done in a decent language. That language should be the same on client and server (and I won't tell you why).

All web scripting somehow started with JavaScript. You could embed it on your server side if you really want to.

One can target JavaScript (and also targets ActionScript) with the haXe language. It also has a server component, going through an Apache plugin.

The Links language promises to compile from a single source database updates and Javascript bits in your page.

OTOH, one can get a nice language, XML capabilities and leverage the whole Java shebang using the Scala language. However, the whole backend-multiplexing thing is missing as of yet.

so you want to start a blog, eh?

No meta-discussion, no navel-gazing, no propaganda. No technical details.

Once again scanning the web for frameworks, I got lost in Apache MyFaces and Tapestry and of course Google Web Toolkit the new kid on the block.

Over lunch, a discussion on JavaScript turns onto the XML lane and I realize that is another something that is missing in that language, just like actors.