JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#121

Post by goatlover » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:00 PM UTC

fzzzy wrote: post #109

goatlover wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but there are better alternatives, and now that JS isn't just confined to the web, where it had no real competition, people are complaining because they see it being used instead of better tools that have been available for a long time.

ES6 is better. [edit] ES6 is definitely better than a swift kick in the groin. It is certainly better than the original version of javascript. And it is also better than a lobotomy.

ES6 is definitely a better Javascript. But whether it's better than other languages on the server (or desktop) side is the question. But maybe by ES10 it will be.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#122

Post by kybernetikos » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:01 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #102

fzzzy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it is extremely successful because it's not a bad language. Sure, there's lots of "wat", but a non-professional programmer is going to say "wat" about every strange error they get from another programming language that js would have just passed silently with a weird result. Then they will replace whatever construct isn't working with one that does, and get on with their life, unlike people who seem to have a lot…

Sure, but there are better alternatives, and now that JS isn't just confined to the web, where it had no real competition, people are complaining because they see it being used instead of better tools that have been available for a long time.

I don't think there is universal agreement on what the better alternatives are. If there were, comments like these would list them. There are however worse examples for desktop development never the less used on the desktop like VBA, java, adobe air, scala.

As with so many choices, there is a trade off. If it were possible to point to some system that is unambiguously better on all axes than javascript and its ecosystem, then you'd have a point, but since there isn't, we're back to arguing trade offs, and really, getting upset about the tools other people choose to make things is a pretty fruitless use of time and energy. If people really want to encourage others to move, they'd be better evangelising the solutions they love than berating people for choosing what they choose.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#123

Post by fenomas » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #16

onion2k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that…

> That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications The difference is there is very little room for optimisation in most javascript runtimes. They don't support multi-threading and the memory is impossible to manage. "Lower" level languages always allow better performance tweaking when necessary. Javascript allows next to none. You can't tell javasc…

This is a non-argument. Firstly, JS does indeed have typed arrays and other tools for managing memory. More importantly, unless you're doing 3D or similar it's vanishingly rare that the memory used by objects you've allocated in JS will be measurable compared to the memory used for DOM objects and rendering generally. Replacing JS with some other language wouldn't affect the memory usage of typical web pages.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#124

Post by mafribe » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:03 PM UTC

catnaroek wrote: post #117

mafribe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is an unclean design. It's not unsound. Otherwise you'det g incorrect results. You could say the design is wasteful, because you optimise and then throw away the optimisation. But it's hard to do better for some kinds of languages. trust a hackish language implementation I agree. And indeed JIT compilers are hard to get right. But in practise even JIT compilers are much higher quality than applications: ask yourself,…

> It's not unsound. Otherwise you'd incorrect results. You could say it's wasteful, because you optimise and then throw away the optimisation. The optimization is unsound. If it weren't, it wouldn't have to be rolled back occasionally. If you're talking about the combination of the optimization and the rollback mechanism, it's not unsound, but it's inelegant. A runtime system designed this way only understands your p…

   The optimization is unsound.

The JIT compiler is sound, w.r.t. to the source language's semantics. That's the only thing that matters for the programmer.

   but it's inelegant.

Elegance is in the eye of the beholder. I was blown away when I first encountered JIT compilers.

  lack of powerful static analyses

That's an orthogonal issue. More powerful static analysis is also more time-consuming. One of the design goals of Javascript JITs is to make web-pages as responsive as possible. That rules out complicated static analysis.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#125

Post by sdegutis » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

nothis wrote: post #115

fzzzy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it is extremely successful because it's not a bad language. Sure, there's lots of "wat", but a non-professional programmer is going to say "wat" about every strange error they get from another programming language that js would have just passed silently with a weird result. Then they will replace whatever construct isn't working with one that does, and get on with their life, unlike people who seem to have a lot…

I mean, the whole "{} + [] == 0" thing is cute and all, but isn't that just tip-of-the-iceberg hilarity? Isn't the real problem with javascript that it's slow and messy?

I was under the impression modern JS interpreters JIT to machine code and are fast. Kind of like how Java was slow in 1995 but today is kind of amazingly fast. Which I guess implies that there are two ways a language can become fast: one is by being designed for speed, and another is by becoming extremely popular/useful and having tons of millions of hours of thought and work put into making it faster.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#126

Post by smallnamespace » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

catnaroek wrote: post #117

mafribe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is an unclean design. It's not unsound. Otherwise you'det g incorrect results. You could say the design is wasteful, because you optimise and then throw away the optimisation. But it's hard to do better for some kinds of languages. trust a hackish language implementation I agree. And indeed JIT compilers are hard to get right. But in practise even JIT compilers are much higher quality than applications: ask yourself,…

> It's not unsound. Otherwise you'd incorrect results. You could say it's wasteful, because you optimise and then throw away the optimisation. The optimization is unsound. If it weren't, it wouldn't have to be rolled back occasionally. If you're talking about the combination of the optimization and the rollback mechanism, it's not unsound, but it's inelegant. A runtime system designed this way only understands your p…

> it's not unsound, but it's inelegant. A runtime system designed this way only understands your program in a statistical sense (based on concrete execution profiles, which may vary from one run to another), never with the full certainty that static analyses (type checking, abstract interpretation) can give you.

This is a false dichotomy. You can always build a JIT that uses runtime statistics to speed things up, even in languages that are quite amenable to static analysis, for the simple reason that type systems cannot capture all relevant runtime context. Java is a good example here, since it's strongly statically typed.

By your reckoning, all optimistic heuristics that CPUs do like branch prediction and prefetching are also similarly 'inelegant', because they can be wrong and require rolling back.

Optimistic heuristics have a long history in computer science, and IMO it seems strange to single one particular use case as being particularly evil.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#127

Post by st3v3r » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

Part of it is also, custom looking UI, not confined to the platform widgets, is not easy to do on many of the desktop platform libraries. It is incredibly easy to do with HTML/CSS.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#128

Post by goatlover » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

davej wrote: post #74

kartan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience I think that's related to the high fault-tolerance in Javascript. A good developer is good in any language, so she can work with Javascript. A beginner or even a bad developer can make things happen in Javascript, when that is not always possible in other languages. So the entry point level is so low that a lot o…

>> > HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience > I think that's related to the high fault-tolerance in Javascript. Also, in Electron apps you can access the Chromium Dev Tools directly in the app (unless the app author has disabled it). Chromium's Dev Tools are pretty much the gold-standard for hacking during runtime.

SmallTalk and Lisp would have something to say about that.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#129

Post by zaphar » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #57

niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

JS is safe C with types and pointers stripped from the syntax. I don't get why people don't understand its popularity. HTML lets you put boxes on the screen and CSS lets you paint-by-number(id/name/selector). If you aren't doing any of those things, I am very curious to know what exactly you are doing.

JS is most definitely not safe C. It has a brace based syntax with if statements and for loops but other than those superficial similarities it's semantics are vastly different.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#130

Post by alexwebb2 » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #62

> It turns out it’s useful to have a lingua franca for the web. No, I don't think so. Most people do not use JavaScript since it is useful. They use it since it is the only option available on the browser. There is a BIG difference. > Creating desktop apps in JavaScript lets developers choose from a vast range of freely available code libraries and frameworks, which takes much of the grunt work out of coding Lots of…

I can't believe this is the top comment. Let's go point by point:

1) JavaScript has its warts and its gotchas like anything else (okay, maybe a few more). So what? Spend 50 hours building anything substantial with JavaScript and you'll get a good handle on them, and you'll be good to go for the next 10,000 hours. Same goes for just about any other language. Focusing on the weird edge cases might make for a nice blog post, but it's not relevant to people actually building things day to day.

2) Growing pains in a very active community? Unheard of! Okay, so this was embarrassing and disappointing, but at least it's been dealt with. You can keep pointing to it if it helps your argument, but that doesn't make it valid.

3) I don't really understand what point you're trying to make here.

4) Again, very active community. Lots of churn. Plenty of reinventing / rediscovering the wheel. If that _really_ bothers you and you're struggling to separate the signal from the noise, I at least understand and respect that criticism. I don't think that's a reason for anyone to stoop to the level you have, though.