Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if JavaScript wins?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#61

Post by bitL »

nomy99 wrote: post #44
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.

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 inno…

I am working in that area myself, maybe I am just better informed and convinced by what I experimented with. Even Adobe is now doing LEGO-esque photo editing and looking for testers. When we get those things to production, there will be serious shift in basic-level developer demand; those will be likely out of luck soon. Most people would be able to assemble a simple app covering many of their needs just by dictating to their phones what would they expect to see and pre-baked LEGO blocks will be applied. Imagine fun with Minecraft but this time with blocks of properly encapsulated code, real-time using voice, touch and eye tracking.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#62

Post by anildash »

abritinthebay wrote: post #15
chadlavi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 [...]

I mean... he's not wrong.

But it's also got nice folks! :D

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#63

Post by rounce »

bitsoda wrote: post #16
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 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.

> WASM is a compilation target.

Like the VM in the Flash runtime that runs ActionScript bytecode. Part of the GP's point still stands regarding MagicBlob™s. That said, it does differ (massively) in that it doesn't cast the spell of being a closed proprietary format: primarily driven by motivations of it's owner rather than the benefit of it's community.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#64

Post by kizer »

Felk wrote: post #10
kizer wrote: post #6

All the C derivatives are getting closer to one-another. How different are Typescript, C-sharp, and Java? When JavaScript adds gradual typing, interface, etc. won't all these languages be nearly the same? The runtimes will differ but the language features and syntax will be almost the same.

I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. On one side we might get stuck on a local maximum as all languages stick to the universally established features to be marketable, on the other side it seems that some arguably objectively useful abstractions crystallize, which makes things easier for everyone.

I think (hope) that Academia, or individuals, would still be able to churn out "original" languages if there were no immediate need in industry.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#65

Post by nomy99 »

bitL wrote: post #61
nomy99 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inno…

I am working in that area myself, maybe I am just better informed and convinced by what I experimented with. Even Adobe is now doing LEGO-esque photo editing and looking for testers. When we get those things to production, there will be serious shift in basic-level developer demand; those will be likely out of luck soon. Most people would be able to assemble a simple app covering many of their needs just by dictating…

>Most people would be able to assemble a simple app covering many of their needs just by dictating to their phones what would they expect to see and pre-baked LEGO blocks will be applied

Most people don't need an app. Generally, businesses with intent on making profit need an app. Even then, the app is usually just an interface to the real beast driving business value hidden behind a DMZ in the cloud. Even if an application becomes autogenerated, a developer will have more time to focus on the rest of the flow that delivers value.

My point is that as engineers, we build systems using ever improving tools. I don't think we should fear AI and Machine learning, but embrace it and work at higher abstractions to solve even better problems.

I would say a javascript developer might become obsolete, just as a flash developer did. But an engineer focusing on end to end systems who uses javascript won't.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#66

Post by captainbland »

danield9tqh wrote: post #46
abritinthebay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Even then I don't think they would tie it to the WASM definition that tightly as they intend it to be used on other platforms than just web browsers. It seems to me that you could just have the DOM be expressed as a kind of interface which the browser implements, and then each language just has a DOM library which exposes that interface to the programmer.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#67

Post by BWStearns »

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++…

xkcd for everything: https://xkcd.com/297/

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#68

Post by paulhodge »

arcticbull wrote: post #42
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.

Even after 10 years or so, when the tooling is good enough to match the debugging experience we have now, it won't be a moot issue. There will be a much more common problem where you want to examine/modify the source code for a site, and you can't, because that site only published the non-debug WASM. One of the things that keeps the web platform healthy is the way that client-side sources are pretty visible.

In response to "But JS can be obfuscated/minified" - Minified JS is still much easier to examine/modify than WASM, and it's really rare for a site to deliberately obfuscate their JS beyond minification.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#69

Post by paulhodge »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #47
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?

It's not just a matter of switching your brain, it's also about reusing code across projects, and being able to use the same toolset for everything.

But on the topic of switching your brain, you have to know that not all developers can switch between languages as easily, they aren't all special geniuses like you.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#70

Post by kapv89 »

bitL wrote: post #48
kapv89 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 talkin…

My bad. By the way, I didn't think of you as a noob, I just wanted to see if you have explored JS to the point of being able to use it predictable while managing a few developers.

In my defence:

I haven't worked on webGL or facial/emotion tracking system with CV in a browser yet. My experience has been more towards apps that tend to be very heavy in functionality, and are written with a specific personas of users in mind.

I have been using JS in a functional manner for quite a few years. And I have found that JS works best when you don't have to deal in classes when writing domain-specific code. Using "functions-as-first-class-citizens" is what I have found works in scalable way. And I generally get any new junior dev up to speed on basics of functional programming before working with them.

(By the way, have you seen https://js.tensorflow.org/)

EDIT: By the way, I mentioned tensofrlow.js because with it, if you have a dataset, you can prototype the emotional recognition thing in a week or two. Just don't have the need/time to spend that effort at the moment. Needed to share that information in order to see if i'm correctly gauging the complexity of the type of work you mentioned.

Post reply on HN