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What if JavaScript wins?

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Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#31

Post by jpfed »

abritinthebay wrote: post #14
captainbland wrote: post #2

I 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.

This is a common sentiment but it certainly doesn't cover "all the things" people hate. I hate dynamic types, I hate imperatively constructing "types" through prototypal inheritance, I hate "this", and none of that has anything to do with the DOM.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#32

Post by nomy99 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #29
nomy99 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the future programmers won't be replaced by robots, they will be replaced by import statements." I disagree. How is this different from someone 20 years ago saying programmers will be replaced by jar files.

Yeah, the reality is some of us got replaced by Adobe and Salesforce.

So you are saying you couldn't apply your skills as a java developer anymore because of salesforce?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#33

Post by bitL »

coderzach wrote: post #28
bitL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally restrict yourself to one of the worst languages ever designed. What could be solved with elegance and without demoralizing your staff in 5 minutes in some other language, in JavaScript it might require "sailing to Africa and back" to achieve the same (though I must say it has improved a bit recently from the insanity it used to be). On paper it might look good to you, but the reality is very different a…

What's an example of a "sailing to Africa and back" problem in JavaScript?

Emulating classes hierarchy using prototypes while always keeping on mind what "this" means right here right now at this very call stack/context, without async/await basically any resource loading (unless you use some lib that is hiding nasty pieces from you), no enforced object structure/properties and passing them arbitrarily and then in the next version needing to add/remove some property everywhere, and many more.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#34

Post by kapv89 »

bitL wrote: post #21
kapv89 wrote: post #17

For 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…

You literally restrict yourself to one of the worst languages ever designed. What could be solved with elegance and without demoralizing your staff in 5 minutes in some other language, in JavaScript it might require "sailing to Africa and back" to achieve the same (though I must say it has improved a bit recently from the insanity it used to be). On paper it might look good to you, but the reality is very different a…

1. Can you give me an exam of something that is trivial in another lang, but requires "sailing to Africa and back" in JS?

2. What sort of scalability issues related to Node.js are you talking about? Isn't node.js (thanks to V8, and async IO) much more performance friendly than other scripting langs?

3. Regarding web-stack changing quickly, this hasn't effected me on server side yet. It has effected me on the mobile apps and web app side of things where I am using react 15.x, but it'll make sense to tackle that after raising meeting the next few business milestones.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#35

Post by _pdp_ »

You are completely missing the point here. It is not the question if JavaScripts wins - humans are not great at writing software to begin with regardless of the language. Soon, machine-learning assisted programming will be a thing and JavaScript will be a non-issue - applicable to any other language for that matter.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#36

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

shiado wrote: post #19

I 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…

Not to attack you personally, but it seems like you have never written software professionally. All the available packages you mention quickly become useless as soon as you have a use case that is not in the package's, often very short, README. More often than not, you need functionality which is at the intersection of what is provided by 2 or more packages with no easy means to make them work with one another nicely, so you basically have to write one for yourself. And when you remove all these useless packages, you get a set of useful packages which are not unique to javascript but can be found in any mature language.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#38

Post by TomK32 »

throwpoiu09 wrote: post #26

To put things in perspective, every decade there is an uber popular so called simple but highly inadequate non-type checked language that is taking over the world of novice developers. It's a social phenomenon. Started with Basic, JavaScript is the latest incarnation. By the same token, there is also one overcomplicated yet unavoidable professional language. In that sense, Scala these days has a proud lineage of C++…

the border between non-type and type check languages is getting diffuse these days with typescript going one way and C++ the other way http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/auto

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#39

Post by Felk »

mLuby wrote: post #23
kapv89 wrote: post #17

For 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…

100%. In addition, I know I can hire tons of mid-level people with JS skills and they'll be effective quickly. As much as I'd love to throw a bunch of Haskell into the codebase, the vast majority of engineers will take a while to be productive in it.

Be aware that this might be short term thinking. What you gain in getting features done fast by mid level developers will probably cost you later in the form of technical debt. I'm not saying you can't write good and maintainable software in JS, but the features and practices other languages offer (strong and static typing, interfaces or traits, ownership reinforcements, monadic entities like list comprehensions) aren't there just to make things harder. They are usually worth the perceived extra complexity for bigger projects

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#40

Post by bitL »

woah wrote: post #30
bitL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> highly generic, often looking to implement something completely off the shelf as far as problems go. There is serious work being undergone in automating this using advanced ML. In 5-10 years most of these problems will be LEGO-ized and humans won't be needed on that level. So your generic JavaScript developer used to glue these pieces will be gone.

That’s been 5-10 years out since the 50’s, right?

Yeah, but this time we actually seem to have some half-functioning ML in form of Deep (Reinforcement) Learning, which we didn't have before. You can't expect all issues will be automated away, but more like a gradual process when more and more tasks will be, and companies competing with each other on who finds a new way to automate something, like we saw with any explosive R&D in the past.
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