Building OS X Apps with JavaScript

<i>That pipe is a C bitwise OR operator. I’m not gonna pretend to know what that means.</i><p>I&#x27;m honestly not being sarcastic, but I think there&#x27;s something interesting about reading an enjoyable programming article by someone who doesn&#x27;t know what bitwise OR is. It sorta feels like a huge reminder we&#x27;ve moved on to a whole new generation&#x2F;level of abstraction where competent developers no longer need to understand binary.<p>I gave a talk the other day about the future of code (think 2024 and on) and one of the biggest things out of my research was that we&#x27;ll eventually not need to think about intermediate data structures in code anymore as AI profilers, VMs, compilers, etc. will be able to optimize and profile almost everything away with developers working more with specifications and constraints. I wonder if in 10 years&#x27; time a programmer not knowing what a linked list or a binary tree is will not be considered unusual either.

You know, I understand the urge, once one has really gotten deep and mastered their first language, to try to apply it everywhere. But I really must strongly encourage the kids on the come-up to continue mastering new tools. It&#x27;s not that javascript is a bad language (although that helps), so much as the industry doesn&#x27;t allow any of us to rest on our laurels. This year&#x27;s rock star is tomorrow&#x27;s dinosaur.

The really cool thing about this is that you can also use alternative languages which compile to Javascript. I develop Cursive, an IDE for Clojure and Clojurescript, and one of my users has a native app written in Clojurescript published on the App Store. He had to jump through a few hoops to get the REPL working but once he got it going he could edit code on his device live. It&#x27;s really cool to see. I&#x27;m hoping to add debugging support using the Webkit Remote Debugging Protocol, which will make it even nicer.

Will Apple allow apps written with this to be distribued on the Mac App Store?<p>I don&#x27;t see why they wouldn&#x27;t, but I couldn&#x27;t find a confirmation either way.

What&#x27;s great about this isn&#x27;t just that you can do it with JavaScript, which is much easier than ObjC, and probably also easier than Swift.<p>It&#x27;s that it&#x27;s also essentially natively supported. Having futzed with PyQt and PyObjC to build a medium-sized desktop application, I never want to go back to dealing with bridges to low-level libraries again. But this looks much more manageable.<p>Reading this code makes me think I just might write an OSX app again some day. And if CoffeeScript can compile down to it - no idea why it couldn&#x27;t - even better.

What I wonder is: can this style of development be used with Interface Builder?

Learning Objective-C was never the limiting factor for me writing native OS X code. The hard part about it was always figuring out the APIs. It&#x27;s one of those things where if you have someone to teach you it&#x27;s great, but learning on your own is time consuming and tedious and frustrating.<p>As much as I like using JS for scripting purposes in the OS, I feel like with this, I have the same problem: namely that the cocoa APIs are massive and I have trouble understanding what&#x27;s going on, even after trying to learn them three or four times in the past decade.

Nice!