…so said Gerald Sussman, when a Lisper asked why MIT switched from Scheme to Python, and why SICP was replaced with a robotics class. (the full quote or paraphrasing is really brilliant and I think sums up a large part of the experience of my generation of programmers, and not just the ones who went to MIT).

That’s old news, and this post isn’t commenting on that. It’s just that this has been ringing truer and truer for me recently, as I struggle to get some useful work done using Android’s WebView. I think the struggle is paying off, since with the help of the source I’ve been able to cut to some truth in places.

I’ve also been struggling to get unit tests that exercise code interacting with a WebView, and with JavaScript running in a WebView, to work at all. When the code for a unit test is more complicated and requires more careful thought, than the code under test, I think there may be something sour going on.

When working with this framework (WebView on Android, and Android in general) more often then not you end up with this wretched slurry of (relatively) weakly, statically typed Java, untyped XML configuration files, and weakly, dynamically typed JavaScript that’s deeply removed from the REPL. (Yep, I’m throwing brickbats with weasel words here) It makes one yearn for the kind of strict and exacting type safety of Haskell. It’s back to Haskell for me, although not for Android apps, unfortunately. Maybe Scala could fill that role, although I suspect it would be just halfway on a log scale.

I really don’t understand types well enough to whinge in this fashion, so I’ve begun some levelling up there. This thread on Hacker News gave me a lot to ponder. I hope TAPL has the answers.