Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast? • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by spion » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 5:45 AM UTC

smitherfield wrote: post #272

spion wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Go's type system is so bad that it nullifies all the benefits it brings to the table. I'd rather have no type system than Go's type system, but why even ponder that if I can have everything? With JS I can start out with dynamic types, then switch to static types if the need arises (typescript, flow), fully or partially. Oh, and both of those have really good generics btw. And we have async/await to…

Python has async/await now too (and it's considerably nicer than JS's version).

mypy is immature compared to TypeScript and Flow.

In theory, python is better (mypy, pypy, async/await). In practice most libs don't use asyncio (in node everything does and can be auto-promisified), can't run on pypy (in node everything runs with the fast JIT optimizing things) and the typechecker is not mature enough to express most things (unlike TS/Flow).

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

#302

Post by BrendanEich » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 6:14 AM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #292

qznc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is the only language integrated into the browser and the DOM. Netscape rejected other languages (Python, Perl, TCL) because of syntax, so Brendan Eich disguised Scheme into Java syntax and hacked up a prototype in 10 days. Today, Javascript is sooo interwoven with the DOM in browsers that it is near impossible to separate them. Google planned to do this for Dart, but gave up. If they had done this and other browse…

1. WebKit rejected adding barriers to support multiple garbage collectors and a super-GC to collect cycles, required by Dart or any 2nd VM. See https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... where Fil Pizlo of Apple cites 5% throughput regression. Dart was never going to make it, and adding 3 or 4 VMs with their own GCs is even less plausible. 2. See https://github.com/WebAssembly for progress on wha…

And now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12838335

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

#303

Post by Silhouette » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 10:07 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #300

Silhouette wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem is discoverability/installation/security etc we could focus on app stores and sandboxes To this day, I maintain that if Microsoft hadn't neglected that essential aspect of the Windows ecosystem for decades, they would probably still dominate the personal computing industry.

Uh... Oh, you mean 'personal computing' in it's original sense, which encompasses mobile platforms as well, not just desktop computers.

Right. IMHO, a lot of the reason that alternative devices, from smartphones to games consoles, took off was they solved the biggest long-standing headache for Windows users: they just wanted to get and use software to do things, not to worry about installing and configuring and updating that software or potential difficulties with removing it or how it interacted with other software.