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The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

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Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#141

Post by mapgrep »

cognivore wrote: post #122
samcodes wrote: post #44

I have learned so much from comments on Hacker News. Every time one of these articles gets posted I hope that I will get to see some thoughtful commentary on why the ecosystem looks like this: is it the enormous influx of new talent? Is it the consensus to finally drop IE support, and that we're getting a decade of progress in two years? What business demands are driving this technology? Is this a race to make the br…

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

I'm not sure putting down JavaScript, web browsers, and the DOM, and saying the ideal future is completely free of apps built on this platform, is technically being "productive" in a conversation ABOUT those things, but setting that aside:

The web app platform represents one of the largest, if not literally THE largest, explosions of programming and application development ever seen in the history of humankind. It also represents one of the most open and portable computing environments ever developed. It incubated a revolutionary and indispensable app for indexing, searching, and retrieving an unprecedented staggering corpus of human knowledge (Google.com); apps that have enabled hundreds of millions of people to effortlessly publish their writing, videos, pictures, etc globally and instantly (Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, etc etc); apps that make it trivial to find most of the people you have ever known and to collapse time and space to communicate with them (Facebook, Gmail, etc etc); apps that enable you to select virtually any product imaginable and have it delivered, usually within 24 hours if needed (Amazon, Ebay, etc etc); not to mention probably millions of other more obscure apps to handle amazingly specific mundanities of office life, travel, entertainment, citizenship, finance, etc etc etc.

To look at all this and land on the conclusion that JavaScript and the web stack are fucked up‚— "a language that is universally regarded as one of the worst ever" — period, full stop, EOM, throw them out — seems aggressively contemptuous and beside the point.

It's sort of like looking at a raging party filled with some of the most interesting people you've known and some of the most interesting people you've ever heard of and complaining about the type of speakers being used to play the music.

I can't speak for the OP but I think that's roughly what they were getting at.

(Also, side note, Tim Berners Lee may perhaps have conceived the web as a place for documents, but he also seems to have since then embraced it as an application platform, not that his opinion or original vision should in any way confine what the web becomes. http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/09/tim-berners-lee-sxsw/ )

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#142

Post by untog »

cableshaft wrote: post #140
untog wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge boon for administration - auto updates, no install procedure, cross platform...

...and difficult to pirate, a major reason so much software moved to the web. On the negative side for the consumer, the software and whatever data you committed to it will disappear if the company ever decides to stop supporting it or shuts down. Also you are pretty much forced to be online in order to use it, so if your device isn't in a wifi friendly area and/or you're trying to limit your internet usage for whate…

That's actually not true with cache manifests, IndexedDB and service workers. You can make an entirely fully-offline webapp that stores data locally. This is all relatively new stuff, of course.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#143

Post by cmaher »

cognivore wrote: post #122
samcodes wrote: post #44

I have learned so much from comments on Hacker News. Every time one of these articles gets posted I hope that I will get to see some thoughtful commentary on why the ecosystem looks like this: is it the enormous influx of new talent? Is it the consensus to finally drop IE support, and that we're getting a decade of progress in two years? What business demands are driving this technology? Is this a race to make the br…

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

> Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications

At this point, this is argument is 100% false. Browsers of today aren't the browsers of the 90s. Chrome came out in 2008 and has ALWAYS been designed to run applications, and an entire operating (ChromeOS) is based on the idea that the browser isn't just a system built for viewing linked documents, but a valid application platform.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#144

Post by NDizzle »

The only horse to bet on at the moment is jQuery. I know, I know. I'm old and I don't do exciting things. I work mainly on a niche product in a boring field.

But you know what? My site works with IE8+. I can deploy code without much thought as to what is going to break. My deploy script takes 15 seconds. I don't have to rewrite anything every 3-6 months. I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and it works exactly as expected.

I'll welcome all you bleeding edge javascript hippies back with open arms. But you have to use the side door. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f0/10/a3/f010a3aad...

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#145

Post by icedchai »

prewett wrote: post #35
PhilWright wrote: post #17

We are simply going through a Cambrian explosion in the JavaScript ecosystem. Today there is huge demand for the ability to develop desktop standard applications inside the browser. At some point in the last few years we hit a tipping point where the potential to do this was unleashed. I am not sure exactly what the technology was that tipped us over, maybe a combination of several. Was it fast JavaScript performance…

JavaScript is the only UI environment that has gone through 10 years of solid churn. Pick any other UI environment besides HTML/CSS/Javscript and it is pretty stable. So why is the web so churny? It makes me think there is something rotten underneath.

The churn is simple to explain: HTML/CSS/JS was never intended for building applications. We've been trying to turn a document delivery platform into an app platform. As a result, we need all this "tooling" to fit square pegs into round holes.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#146

Post by davidgl »

askyourmother wrote: post #76
samcodes wrote: post #44

I have learned so much from comments on Hacker News. Every time one of these articles gets posted I hope that I will get to see some thoughtful commentary on why the ecosystem looks like this: is it the enormous influx of new talent? Is it the consensus to finally drop IE support, and that we're getting a decade of progress in two years? What business demands are driving this technology? Is this a race to make the br…

A lot of js devs came straight to js without any previous language experience. Hence we are seeing lots of ideas and frameworks thrown out there. The worst example is the proliferation of single function libraries, yes, create a js lib for a single function. It will settle down. Mostly as the devs grow a bit older and wiser, and as the end users start to rebel a bit harder - already non-tech people are publically lam…

I think part of this is the built in functions/frameworks for Javascript are so small.

Coding in Ruby, C# or whatever is about learning the standard library as much as the syntax.

So much of the churn is caused by the constant rewriting of basic functionality (e.g. date handling), if we had a bigger and standardised standard library, we wouldn't need half of the packages

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#147

Post by cableshaft »

untog wrote: post #142
cableshaft wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and difficult to pirate, a major reason so much software moved to the web. On the negative side for the consumer, the software and whatever data you committed to it will disappear if the company ever decides to stop supporting it or shuts down. Also you are pretty much forced to be online in order to use it, so if your device isn't in a wifi friendly area and/or you're trying to limit your internet usage for whate…

That's actually not true with cache manifests, IndexedDB and service workers. You can make an entirely fully-offline webapp that stores data locally. This is all relatively new stuff, of course.

That's true, although it tends to hide the data in some '/users/documents/appdata/local/roaming/cache' craziness rather than true i/o. I still can't load a preferences file off my ~/crazy_named_personal_folder, update it, and then save to the same location, at least as far as I know (I've only played around with local storage briefly).

And that's a lot easier to lose and a lot less portable than all the stuff I care about in a single folder that I sync with an external hard drive, a usb drive, and dropbox, automatically.

But it's still better than nothing, and I'm glad it's an option now.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#148

Post by brightball »

NDizzle wrote: post #144

The only horse to bet on at the moment is jQuery. I know, I know. I'm old and I don't do exciting things. I work mainly on a niche product in a boring field. But you know what? My site works with IE8+. I can deploy code without much thought as to what is going to break. My deploy script takes 15 seconds. I don't have to rewrite anything every 3-6 months. I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and…

> I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and it works exactly as expected.

This is a factor taken for granted far, far too often.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#149

Post by dham »

NDizzle wrote: post #144

The only horse to bet on at the moment is jQuery. I know, I know. I'm old and I don't do exciting things. I work mainly on a niche product in a boring field. But you know what? My site works with IE8+. I can deploy code without much thought as to what is going to break. My deploy script takes 15 seconds. I don't have to rewrite anything every 3-6 months. I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and…

Imperative jQuery isn't that bad at all. I agree with you. Once I actually sat down and really learned Javascript 4 or 5 years ago my jQuery got a lot better. I don't think developers understand how to write maintainable jQuery. I see a lot of code where people unbind events before they bind and not using the .on methods.

It will still crumble in super complex interfaces though. Which in my experience don't pop up that often, and when they do it's only on one or two pages.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#150

Post by dasil003 »

mapgrep wrote: post #141
cognivore wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

I'm not sure putting down JavaScript, web browsers, and the DOM, and saying the ideal future is completely free of apps built on this platform, is technically being "productive" in a conversation ABOUT those things, but setting that aside: The web app platform represents one of the largest, if not literally THE largest, explosions of programming and application development ever seen in the history of humankind. It al…

I wish I would upvote you 100 times. I've been a web developer over 20 years now. This attitude, that the web is unsuitable for applications, was understandable 15 years ago at the birth of web apps, but it doesn't make any sense today.

People need to realize there's never been a platform like the web in terms of portability and accessibility. Comparing the web to GUI toolkits is like saying that comparing Linux desktops to Mac OS X—Linux environments can never have the polish of OS X because Apple controls the entire stack. Similarly, a GUI toolkit can only be as cross-platform as the vendor makes (which is historically pretty terrible for all cross-platform GUI toolkits). The web is not only a standard, but a standard whose implementation is the price of entry for all new devices.

Furthermore, everyone complaining about the web's shortcomings doesn't have the whole picture—in fact the most difficult thing about a standard of this size is that no single individual or organization has the whole picture of what the standard supports. Sure the web was designed for simple documents and evolved into something for which it was never intended, why is this a bad thing? The fact is that you can never replace the web because A) there is no human power great enough to force adoption, it can only happen by serendipity (just like the web) and B) by the time you were done you would have a whole different set of warts that everyone would complain about. People would do well to remember Gall's Law before condemning web-as-app-platform.

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