Anil!
> Finally, there are the networked information sources for news and discussion, primary among them being Hacker News. Though it’s notoriously the most hostile of these large, networked coder communities [...]
What if JavaScript wins?
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#12Mark my words, Web ASM will be just as opaque as traditional assembly languages. Which is to say that we'll shift the problem from "JavaScript is bad" to "I cannot debug this," "I cannot see what this script does," "I lost the original source code, and now I have to reverse engineer WASM! Help!" WASM isn't a panacea. Much like Flash, Java Applets, and ActiveX it is just the newest in a long line of Magic Blobs™ that…
> manually reviewing WASM
You should not write code in WASM.
You should not review WASM.
In the same way that most Java developers don't have a clue how bytecode works in the JVM.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#13Blazor and similar technologies built on WASM are the future of web dev. http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2018/02/06/blazor-intro/ I no longer read articles on JavaScript or related libraries, it's all obsolete. I know enough JS and TypeScript to get by until WASM-based tech takes over, hopefully within 2 years.
Given the popularity of Node.js, I doubt this. JavaScript is still winning when people have the option to use C# or C++ or Scala or whatever else.
The type of organizations I work on, node.js is only used as requirement for Web frontends.
Which I anyway avoid thanks the bundlers in Java and .NET frameworks.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#14I think within a few years WASM will finally be in a place where it becomes usable without relying on JavaScript for interfacing with the web browser and people will be able to develop high-performance, isomorphic web applications in other programming languages. This will definitely start to eat into it as it makes gains elsewhere. As such, I don't really see JavaScript reaching the level of dominance implied in this…
> it becomes usable [...] for interfacing with the web browser
As soon as you add DOM integration... all the things people hate about JS in terms of architecture and compromises will show up in WASM.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#15Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#16Mark my words, Web ASM will be just as opaque as traditional assembly languages. Which is to say that we'll shift the problem from "JavaScript is bad" to "I cannot debug this," "I cannot see what this script does," "I lost the original source code, and now I have to reverse engineer WASM! Help!" WASM isn't a panacea. Much like Flash, Java Applets, and ActiveX it is just the newest in a long line of Magic Blobs™ that…
WASM is a compilation target. Think of it as a little machine in the browser you're writing code for. While you technically could write direct WASM code, the idea here is to have other languages compile to it, which you could then debug as normal.
Outside of needing some extreme performance optimization, most web developers should never need to read or write WASM code.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#17For me, as a founder of a young startup, the overarching benefit of being proficient in modern JS and sorrounding tooling is that I can use the same language for my whole stack(servers, web, Android, iOS), and spend more time thinking about the product and business. In the possible future where the company grows enough where it needs a distributed server software, the only part of the product that'd be changing would be the backend, and I'd probably look at Java for that. For the rest, React(& react-native) + graphql + a typesystem is a pretty good stack for UI software.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#18If a non-typed language wins, then god help us and I fear for the youth :)
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#19I used to hate JS because the language is objectively badly designed, but then I realized that the merits of the language provide a glimpse of the future of programming.
Most programming problems people have are highly generic, often looking to implement something completely off the shelf as far as problems go. Wheels can only be reinvented so many times in so many ways.
To me the JS ecosystem offers a level of high level programming that you just don't get in other languages. Nothing comes close. There is a package for every possible problem you have just waiting to be used. You wan't some complicated auth feature? Consider it done with one require statement and calling a function to set a configuration. You want some reusable components for your frontend to solve some complicated issue? Somebody has a crazy React package doing exactly what you need. Obviously there are security concerns with this but that is a totally separate topic.
In the future programmers won't be replaced by robots, they will be replaced by import statements.
Re: What if JavaScript wins?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the popularity of Node.js, I doubt this. JavaScript is still winning when people have the option to use C# or C++ or Scala or whatever else.
The type of organizations I work on, node.js is only used as requirement for Web frontends. Which I anyway avoid thanks the bundlers in Java and .NET frameworks.
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