51–60 of 303 posts
It's always on. Anyone from anywhere can interact with what you create instantly. What else is like that ?
In an industry without a guild / license / what have you, the incentives skew towards articles of proof. Articles of proof could be demo websites, screen shots, and open source libraries. Being the creator or top two contributor of a library is now worth so much more than being a small time contributor that the incentives are skewed towards everyone just making a new thing, always. It's their way to stand out. So why…
Cause JavaScript is used in browsers so it is the language of the web, and because it has turned out to be incredibly flexible and adaptable, and because it's pretty simple once yo get past the async thing, and because alot of effort has gone into making it fast.
I think out of all the comments so far this passes closest to the real reason. It's simple: if you're developing for the web, you almost certainly have to use Javascript . That reality corrals so many more people into Javascript than any other language.
In an industry without a guild / license / what have you, the incentives skew towards articles of proof. Articles of proof could be demo websites, screen shots, and open source libraries. Being the creator or top two contributor of a library is now worth so much more than being a small time contributor that the incentives are skewed towards everyone just making a new thing, always. It's their way to stand out. So why…
That explains why lots of libraries get written, but not why they get used .
I'll admit im not sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind sharing why you consider node.js and other server-side javascript tools irrational?
Unless your project is small (like under 10-20k lines), why use node when you can use a typed language? Javascript is a mess and if I'm server side and using something dynamic, I might as well use something nicer like ruby or python.
> if I'm server side and using something dynamic, I might as well
> use something nicer like ruby or python.
The code is pretty much identical between Ruby, Python, and Javascript once you have a yield/await abstraction in the latter.
As you walk, you realise that each of them uses selection of screws and chisels and screws and wheels, and types of wood and door handles and all of them are somehow different. Not because they have to be, but because they were acquired independently by each worker. You come with an idea that if you standardise on some set of commonly used wheels and handles and chisels. This means you will need less of them, it will be easier for each worker to acquire, reuse and combine them, less time spend relearning different tools and a lot more other benefits. Once you did that, you may realise that the things built on top of that - like drawers, doors, covers - can benefit from the same standardisation. And so you do and keep improving your factory. Notice however that such idea would never come from single worker.
So JS is stuck at being early-stage factory. Main thing that it lacks is a boss that looks at it and improves it. Any proposed change has to gather momentum, convince some committee and even than it takes years to push it. It takes so much effort that most of the time anyone who tries just gives up. Where in other languages its enough to send complain email and propose a solution to one mailing list to get someone involved and get proposed change deployed in the next release a month later, you can't do it with js. For the same reason there is nobody to make a sweeping change and wipe this disaster from earth. Too much politics involved. So everyone hack his way around it, and hacks are not very maintainable, so you'll need to redo them on next project, but very differently. Making any two projects incompatible and hard to build one on top of another.
Java had its Sun, Python had BDFL Guido, JS has no such thing.
The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub recently announced: https://octoverse.github.com/ Open source JavaScript activity as measured by pull requests has doubled (!!) in the past year. It's more than the next two languages (Java and Python) combined. Most of the top repositories on GitHub are JavaScri…
To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.
I think all the churn is a sign of several problems. First, the language was not designed to do what people are trying to use it for. Second, I question whether the framework makers are familiar with "native" UI APIs (e.g. Java, Qt, NextStep), which solved a lot of these problems years ago. Notice the lack of churn in native UI APIs (exception of Microsoft). Third, it seems like the frameworks try to build on top of…
> I think we need a standardized virtual machine, like a lightweight JVM (or, better, a heavyweight Lua), which would allow people to use whatever language they prefer To be fair, a lot of languages compile to Javascript. Do we really need a second standard?
The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub recently announced: https://octoverse.github.com/ Open source JavaScript activity as measured by pull requests has doubled (!!) in the past year. It's more than the next two languages (Java and Python) combined. Most of the top repositories on GitHub are JavaScri…
To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.
* Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor?
* Do you really want to control a webpage's state without JS models in the browser?
* Do you really want to update html with individual jquery calls?
* Do you really want to write websites _without_ using jquery? Keep in mind that jquery is only 10 years old.
I'm glad that we have an open market to exchange people's ideas. Yes, a lot of it is crap, and even among the highly adopted packages there will be problems. But that's the beauty of the market-- people can vote with their feet.
This article sums up how I feel: http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/
> "Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake." - Rudyard Kipling in 1890