Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 303 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#121

Post by Silhouette »

cdata wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum…

The reason JavaScript is the de facto standard language for front-end web development seems obvious: it's effectively the only language for that development. There have previously been other popular choices, but browser developers have killed support for those alternatives for their own reasons.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#122

Post by ssalazar »

roblabla wrote: post #101
tempodox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> explanation for why their platform / language / framework [...] did not become the de facto tool You're implying this happened to JS because of some merit. But it didn't, it was just sheer coincidence and bad luck (for most of us at least, including users).

Explain what the coincidence was ? There are alternatives everywhere (ActiveX, flash, java, visual basic IIRC). And yet here we are, with JS. I believe JS came here because it actually is the best language we have had in the web. It's so easy to throw shit arround, but let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't purely out of luck.

JavaScript beats those out because a.) it integrates with the DOM b.) its the only one that works on every platform today (people seem to forget that before the iPhone, web apps were heavily Flash-based). These features are powerful, but don't necessarily reflect the quality of the language design or development ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#123

Post by [deleted] »

danappelxx wrote: post #114
roblabla wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain what the coincidence was ? There are alternatives everywhere (ActiveX, flash, java, visual basic IIRC). And yet here we are, with JS. I believe JS came here because it actually is the best language we have had in the web. It's so easy to throw shit arround, but let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't purely out of luck.

JS won out the web because it came with HTML5, not the other way around.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#124

Post by niftich »

roblabla wrote: post #101
tempodox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> explanation for why their platform / language / framework [...] did not become the de facto tool You're implying this happened to JS because of some merit. But it didn't, it was just sheer coincidence and bad luck (for most of us at least, including users).

Explain what the coincidence was ? There are alternatives everywhere (ActiveX, flash, java, visual basic IIRC). And yet here we are, with JS. I believe JS came here because it actually is the best language we have had in the web. It's so easy to throw shit arround, but let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't purely out of luck.

JS won because it was the only thing that every browser supported from the very beginning, and the various differences in implementation (of which there were many) were eventually shimmable by jQuery and other AJAX frameworks. Everything else was either some alternative only supported by one of the vendors (VBScript, Dart), or a full-blown plugin that had a different model of interaction with the webpage (Java, Shockwave, Flash, Silverlight).

It's pretty much the textbook instance of a compromise between vendors of competing interests to further the common web. Despite this, it took a really, really long time -- almost ten years -- for JS to receive additional browser-implemented APIs that brought that platform's capability to what we know today and comparable to that of what we had with plugins -- and still, not every vendor supports every spec yet, making this "open web" no less subject to vendor pressures, despite being 'open' and 'neutral' [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259827#12259940

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#125

Post by bpicolo »

Tomrn wrote: post #110
civilian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe replace "shepherd" with "standard lib". Python has a pretty complete standard lib. Javascript is lacking it, and that vacuum encourages things like jquery. But then there are people who see jquery getting bloated, and they really just want a few features, so they write underscore and lodash. We've got no standard lib, so we have a continual ebb & flow of unstandard libs.

hundred percent agree with this. A standard lib bundled with all browsers would solve so much of the framework madness.

Especially since Javascript needs it MOST, since we have to transmit it on the wire...

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#126

Post by tscs37 »

life_is_short wrote: post #71
tscs37 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume that A) Types are low level B) C++ and C are the only competition to JavaScript C) Not having to worry about types makes you faster or in any way better A) is simply refuted by looking at java or SQL. SQL is a very high-level language compared to other stuff, yet it's heavily typed simply to ensure that data is either valid or the query fails (SQL Injection is still valid data in this case) B) Take…

> without having to think about threads or synchronization. Just pipe data through the channel! I mostly agree with what you're saying, but note having a channel doesn't mean one stops worrying about synchronization. If two goroutines both started waiting for data from a channel they'd be deadlocked.

True, on the other hand, go will take care of that to some extend and terminate if all go routines have been deadlocked.

Which means well-designed services will remain available even if only with degraded performance.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#127

Post by kxtells »

gravypod wrote: post #112

I think many people are missing what's happening here. This isn't the first time we have seen lots of churn. Every time some group discovers something "new" they latch on to it and try to shape it in their image of what is the best. This is natural and important. Even looking back about 20 years, how many companies where making CPUs? How many different architectures where there? How many companies where making PC clo…

Small Comment.

The ARM architecture is RISC. And mostly every phone/tablet/wearable(even stuff like your TV) has one of those.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#128

Post by ourmandave »

bloomca wrote: post #107

The problem is that everything in JS exploded during just few years (Node was published in 2009), and it took few years to build tooling around Node to start utilising all this power. And then everyone started to build "rich" web applications (it is called differently every year), with the "best" tool existing. I personally see two major problems – usually cool startups who can afford using the bleeding edge will die…

Soon we'll have trouble hiring Angular 1 devs to maintain legacy code, like COBOL.

Except COBOL started in 1959, not 2009.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#129

Post by geofft »

cdata wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum…

> But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users.

Because JavaScript was, and basically still is, the only option for client-side web development - that is to say, it was, and basically is, the only option for distributing sandboxed, instantly-updating executable code to users at any scale. Any other language requires me to convince users to download an application that runs with full privileges on their account. (For a while we also had Flash and Java, but then we realized that Flash and Java basically also imply full privileges, in practice, because their sandboxes don't work well.)

Therefore, JS got popular; therefore, people used it. This has very little to do with the quality of the language or its libraries. Note that I am not criticizing the quality any more than I'm praising it, just saying that it's irrelevant as long as it's good enough.

Basically the same thing happened with UNIX and C at a much smaller scale several decades ago, except it wasn't about client-side app development, it was about getting things to run on servers at all. UNIX isn't a fantastic OS. C isn't a fantastic language. But, in the words of Richard Gabriel's "The Rise of Worse is Better", "UNIX and C are the ultimate computer viruses."

https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

JavaScript and the dynamic web the new ultimate computer viruses. But they grew much, much more quickly, and haven't had the benefit of the last forty-ish years to get decently good. UNIX and C in the middle of the UNIX wars were at least as much of a disaster.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#130

Post by chadgeidel »

cerved wrote: post #115
cdata wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum…

quantity !== quality

There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about the art class which was separated into 2 groups - one group worked on a single project all semester and the other group worked on a new project every day. People in the group that worked on a project every day produced better work than people in the "single project" group. My google-fu is weak, so I cannot find the reference.

I'm not suggesting that the Javascript ecosystem is filled with awesome stuff, but sometimes quantity leads to quality.

Post reply on HN