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JavaScript is Eating the World

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Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#81

Post by tchaffee »

hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

> whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary.

If that's the primary language you are good at, from coding frontend apps, then it's pretty nice to be able to switch to writing backend code without having to do a language context switch. Muscle memory along with your memory about library methods all just continue to flow.

> It can't be that hard using a different language.

If I'm better at one language than another, it is at least somewhat harder. Why struggle when you can flow?

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#82

Post by flavio81 »

mschuetz wrote: post #38
hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

With ES6, JS became a really nice scripting language. Personally, I'm glad to see more and more projects that use javascript outside of web browsers and I've also added V8 to my most recent C++ project. The only major drawback in my opinion is, that it's not statically typed.

The deeper problem is that JS is not strongly typed. Typescript gives you static type checks but the runtime is still weakly typed and will still do all sorts of weird type conversions.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#83

Post by mark024 »

npm and the huge number of dependencies scares me, I remember in WordPress plugins would get hijacked and you would get an update that backdoors or inserts some vulnerability, other than this, I spend 3-4 hours 2 days ago, trying to merge 2 json datasets by doing some averages, and simply could not do it, the numbers were in string format, and it would work for some and get NaN for other, or would just concatenate them as string, I was working in typescript and using "number" was concatenating, weirdest thing ever, I just gave up.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#84

Post by ashark »

lunchables wrote: post #14
hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

I just tell myself it's because the sales pitch is so appealing: learn, and use, one programming language on the front end and back end of your web site. I've never written anything on node.js, but that's the only argument that's ever given me pause.

The front end/back end sharing argument never appealed to me. In practice, how much are you actually going to be able to share? No way it's worth it.

What's finally got me writing way more Javascript than I'd like to is React Native. It's by far the easiest way I know of to share code between iOS and Android, it papers over a lot of Android's irritating/broken UI bits (introducing others, but overall improving the situation), and you actually can share much of your code (practically everything but the UI layer) with a web client—and even... spits... Electron. RN's performance isn't even terrible, especially compared to cross-platform mobile frameworks that have come before it (and to Electron spits)

Hopefully Webassembly will save us in another couple years, and we'll be able to do the same thing in any of several much better languages.

[EDIT] though definitely keep your sanity and use Typescript. I'd have probably jumped off a bridge by now if I were having to do all this in actual JS, of any flavor.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#85

Post by frandroid »

edoceo wrote: post #30

ARG! The floating point handling in JS bites (bytes?) me almost daily. I code in JS every day but I hate this number "bug" the most. Having to frob back and forth with "int" to make it not totally broken. Am I the only one?

Crockford proposes DEC64: http://dec64.com/

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#86

Post by gaius »

jdc0589 wrote: post #78
falcolas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using non-blocking IO is a very old trick. Even nginx does exactly this, and it's written in C. The ability to use non-blocking IO does not make a language unique in any real fashion.

It has nothing to do with the language, there were other serverside javascript frameworks before node; they didn't take off (e.g. Narwhal). Node's success has everything to do with the environment itself in combination with the language. The node runtime, the associated stdlib, and most open source/3rd party modules have been written for a non-blocking runtime from day #1. The same stuff can be achieved in plenty of…

Node's success has everything to do with the environment itself in combination with the language.

Let's be honest: it is nothing to do with either of those and purely a matter of fashion. In a couple of years at most there will be a new new thing and everything will revert to version 0.1, keeping everyone busy but making no actual progress. Gotta soak up those CPU cycles the hardware people are giving us somehow right? Can't let the users get any of that speed for themselves!

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#87

Post by flavio81 »

TrickyRick wrote: post #44
johannes1234321 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Nginx you're not doing computation, just passing IO thru between file system, external processes (i.e. PHP via fpm) and the network. If Nginx ever is CPU bound there's something bad happening. As I mentioned PHP: In PHP each worker is single threaded, too, but you can scale by having more workers in isolation.

What computations do you do in a webserver which hosts a REST API? Most of it is simple CRUD connected to a database, possibly with an auth layer on top, which is pretty much what you describe, passing IO through to a database and back.

> Most of it is simple CRUD connected to a database

If my apps were that way, i could have replaced my team with 20 well-fed monkeys.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#89

Post by swiley »

mark024 wrote: post #83

npm and the huge number of dependencies scares me, I remember in WordPress plugins would get hijacked and you would get an update that backdoors or inserts some vulnerability, other than this, I spend 3-4 hours 2 days ago, trying to merge 2 json datasets by doing some averages, and simply could not do it, the numbers were in string format, and it would work for some and get NaN for other, or would just concatenate th…

I stop reading READMEs as soon as I see npm.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#90

Post by busterarm »

alayek wrote: post #52
nilved wrote: post #6

What a depressing idea. I don't take JavaScript seriously at all.

Sorry to say this, but this kind of statements don't really add anything to the discussion. _Only a sith deals in absolutes_. Recently, JavaScript has adopted lot of language feature from C#, Ruby etc., that make it really useful for most common tasks. And the community moves really really fast, hence adoption of new language syntax is quite fast. JavaScript has some killer platforms / apps, that are being used in pr…

> Recently, JavaScript has adopted lot of language feature from C#, Ruby etc., that make it really useful for most common tasks. And the community moves really really fast, hence adoption of new language syntax is quite fast.

I wasn't aware that a platform's ability to move fast was now a feature. Sounds more like a moving target, honestly.

I want stable tools that let me do things quickly. In the current JavaScript ecosystem, you have the "do things quickly" part without the stable part. It's really easy to get bogged down in the mud. My guess here is that with the increasing industry tendency to move on every <2 years, everyone is building their shaky house and then getting out before it crumbles with them inside.

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