What is Aluminium?
Aluminium was started as an effort to find a different way of creating web applications. It turned out as a visual data-flow based programming language. The main reasons for this were:
- Nature of web applications: web applications are usually built using scripts, which perform relatively simple, repetitive operations on data, which can be easily expressed as data flow charts.
- Readability and maintainability: applications created with a visual language should be easier to read and maintain (on the other hand, it's easy to make ones programs look like real spaghetti :-)).
- Performance: flow based programs can automatically be split into multiple threads (this is not implemented in Aluminium, yet).
Data flow based programming if pretty different from traditional imperative programming, and this brings an interesting point. Some tasks, that otherwise would require a lot of complex traditional code, are easily and naturally solved with a few boxes and lines, while other tasks, that can be solved with a few lines of imperative code, become a real puzzle when implemented with a data-flow language.
It's hard to tell if Aluminium will be suitable for many kinds of tasks. But some tasks will be solved faster and easier with Aluminium, than with traditional tools. Also, it makes the developer think about the problems and solutions from a different angle, and that's a good thing, right?