What do you do when you want to start learning a new language? You go to the language page and try to run some things in the interactive REPL they provide for testing out code, that allows you to get an intuitive grasp of the language. But how would you do that? This article by Ariel Ortiz, even though he presents us the ideas behind template views, the reality is that code is often executed in the web.
When we execute in the web, we are presented with a plethora of vernaculars where we can learn a new language, but definitely the ones which are often are more popular as time progresses, are the ones that we try out with a tutorial or something of the sorts.
Now that we reflect upon this, this is a publication from 2010, where compilers were actually used only for code and templates. Now we are having a lot of transpiling languages. From SASS, LESS, to Babel and Typescript, we can see that transpilation is the new thing now. Having code transformed into a cannonical AST and then being transpiled, is only possible due to the massive advances of computation nowadays.
We are beginning to see a shift from processing in the server, to processing in the client. To get to the maximal canonical view of processing in both places at asynchronous times, to collide to the desired state.
Technologies like React, try to address the previous point. Having event-centric languages is just a symptom of the duality of the processing between the two clients.
To drive the point home, is that we have a lot of technologies which are being executed server and client side that require some type of transpilation. Which ultimately ends up simplifying the lives of the developers which work on this.
Ortiz, Ariel. Building Server-Side Web Language Processors Proceedings of the Forty First SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2010). March 10-13, 2010; Milwaukee, Wisconsin.