WebL – A Programming Language for the Web (1997) [pdf]

Some useful historical context if you&#x27;re much younger than I am: a lot of things that would be Python libraries today couldn&#x27;t be in 1997, because there weren&#x27;t mainstream languages for professional development other than C and C++. In that world, the thing you did if you wanted to express programs as cleanly as you would in Python was to build scripting languages to express them in.<p>We did the same thing with raw packet programming; the only realistic alternative at the time was pre-8.0 Tcl.

I remember this when it first came out. The sequencing combinators are a bit like Occam&#x27;s SEQ and PAR, though with the difference that just one of their arguments will succeed.<p>A couple of years later I worked at a startup with a DSL which worked on similar lines (closer to Occam) but introduced the notion of a &quot;race&quot; (somewhat like the parallel combinator in Webl) so that a number of parallel tasks could be terminated by the one that finished first (possibly some kind of timeout). Occam doesn&#x27;t have that notion at all. Nor does Esterel, or any other similar language that I know of...

It&#x27;s fascinating to see these artifacts from how the web and its possibilities were perceived when it was brand new.<p>By today&#x27;s expectations, I assumed a &quot;programming language for the web&quot; meant a client-side language -- an alternative to Java with a HTTP focus, implemented as a Netscape plugin perhaps. Instead, WebL turned out to be a server-side language for implementing crawlers and data transformers. Quite interesting.

Hey, don&#x27;t you dare give <i>them</i> any ideas! We&#x27;re barely done finishing up with the current standards&#x27; implementations...

Would have been really interesting if someone had made a browser with WebL in the late 90s as an alternative to Netscape and IE.