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What if JavaScript wins?

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Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#41

Post by kapv89 »

bitL wrote: post #33
coderzach wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From this comment, I'll make an inference that you aren't comfortable in writing complex JS apps. Am I right?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#42

Post by arcticbull »

Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Mark 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 just an intermediate representation / compilation target. It's not meant to be human readable or human writeable.

You're right that today it could be difficult to debug things that are compiled down to WASM as initially it was difficult to debug C code compiled to traditional assembly. The next step, though, was debuggers. These will come, and the issue will become moot.

tl;dr: The tooling will follow.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#43

Post by timr »

kapv89 wrote: post #34
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…

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 a…

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

Packages and imports. First-class entities, built in to every other modern language. A mishmash of different "standards" and proprietary implementations in Javascript. Even K&R-era C had a better solution than Javascript (until ES6, anyway).

And do not tell me that ECMAScript 6 fixes this -- as long as there are multiple implementations in use in legacy code (there are) JS will have to live with a rat's nest of horrors at this incredibly fundamental level (not to mention the fact that ES6 imports aren't yet universally supported!)

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#44

Post by nomy99 »

bitL wrote: post #25
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…

> 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.

why is it that in all advancement of machine learning and AI prophecies, the developer becomes obsolete.

Remember, we are automating systems and technology to advance our species when facing tougher problems. The rise of AI and machine learning came out of the necessity of faster computers and a bigger connected community of humans and devices. Turnaround time for features and business value also is driving this innovation.

As systems get more complicated, the roles of developers will change, not be obsolete. For a developer to cease to exist, humanity itself would have to change. When you imply technology being created and managed its own, the implications to society are huge. I might even argue that the species survival would even be at risk here.

I think in the foreseeable future, developers would interface with ever more smart and complete features.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#45

Post by ourmandave »

nomy99 wrote: post #24
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…

"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.

Even if it does come down to just import statements they'll still be plenty of jobs.

Since the deploy tools are rewritten or replaced every couple months somebody has to maintain the build process.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#46

Post by danield9tqh »

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.

I think that's fine because WASM isn't meant to write code in. It's just a source language for other compiled languages. I'm assuming the javascript complaints you're talking about are because people actually have to write javascript code?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#47

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

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…

> the overarching benefit of being proficient in modern JS and sorrounding tooling is that I can use the same language for my whole stack...and spend more time thinking about the product and business

As someone who's proficient in multiple languages, I've never had issues switching between 2 languages. Am I missing something?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#48

Post by bitL »

kapv89 wrote: post #41
bitL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From this comment, I'll make an inference that you aren't comfortable in writing complex JS apps. Am I right?

Dunno, wrote games in JavaScript that left people gasping for air it was possible in a browser, wrote most algorithms in some image/vector processing tool you might be using in your business right now where I had to interleave JVM, JavaScript, WebGL and GLSL in areas nobody tried before; wrote facial/emotion tracking system with advanced computer vision in a browser etc. Maybe I am not a noob you think you are talking to?

I wrote code in way better and more productive languages than JavaScript. I can somehow tolerate JavaScript when I write code alone, but once I have to deal with the fart-mess that most JavaScript developers write, I have to eject. There are very few JavaScript projects that are well designed and I always need to debug and fix them as I put most of them into their knees when they aren't working anymore. You have no idea how far "the best JavaScript" libraries are quality-wise from what you'd expect from a well-designed C++, Java or Scala library.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#49

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

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.

Ok, what about something more mainstream than Haskell, like Java?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#50

Post by bitL »

kapv89 wrote: post #34
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…

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 a…

1. You already responded to that post, so did I

2. Compare some well-designed async framework on JVM like Netty (used by most game studios for their high-throughput servers) with node.js. See the benchmarks. Still wanna use node.js? Do you think you can cost-compete with any company that needs 4x less servers than you do for the same functionality? Show me something close to zeromq capable of reaching over 1M messages/s on a single computer?

3. No comment. Plenty of posts about it over here every year

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