Bruce claims that the “continuation” facility, commonly found in dynamic languages, snaps neatly onto the problem of making the Web look like a linear dialogue. Clearly, continuations are kind of hard to understand and not for casual or novice programmers. No problemo, says Bruce, frameworks like Seaside (layered over Smalltalk) hide the weirdness and let you just carry on an orderly dialogue with a user via a Web browser.
In my mind I was screaming “No! No! No!” because I’ve generally felt that the pain and complexity involved in object-relational and object-XML and object-messaging mapping outweigh the benefits; that if your application is based on exchanging messages, then the message exchange has to be visible to the application programmer. I’m not alone in having this kind of reflex.
Well, it seems that both Ruby on Rails and Seaside would tend to disagree, and the evidence is building up on their side.
And today I had a date with a Vancouver startup that I’ll write up when they’re ready; they have a very damn sophisticated Web app that I wish I’d been smart enough to think of, solid useful function and a ton of graceful little flourishes; and it’s all Seaside, all continuations, all simple methods that conduct orderly dialogues with the user. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can abstract the Web away. Hmph.
A lot of people want to cling to the complexity as some kind of validation. It's nice to see that Tim's not one of them. I wonder what would happen if someone showed Scoble what Seaside can do?
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