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What if JavaScript wins?

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Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#71

Post by kapv89 »

bitL wrote: post #50
kapv89 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 message…

On 2. If you have that requirement, I don't think you can use any scripting language. If you have to use one, JS is probably the best option out there.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#72

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

paulhodge wrote: post #69
tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nice straw man argument. You don't need to be a special genius to be proficient with 2 languages.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#73

Post by bitL »

kapv89 wrote: post #70
bitL wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No problem. I usually learn a new language by picking a very challenging idea and then implementing it; that way I can see how the language performs "under stress", though I might have skewed view for normal use cases. Still, companies seem to be more interested in the weird cases I am forced to explore (much to detriment of my happiness), and JavaScript was making me quite grumpy at times.

Right, with TensorFlow.js (or even better Keras.js) you can write a simple CNN in a few hours that given a good dataset of facial keypoints can allow you to build a fairly accurate (80-90%) emotion detection framework, and it's pretty fast. I am past this stage though; right now I have e.g. a working state-of-art model for detecting offensive visual content on the web based on very deep DenseNet, which might be difficult to fit into a browser implementation and the more Titan Vs you throw at it, the better; Python only then.

I agree, with functional approach, especially with the recent additions to ES, it seems like JS is becoming a quite OK language, though the issue of having somebody using ugly old hacks is not going away, unfortunately.

Usually in teams I worked before for anything more complex we used transpilers from one language to JavaScript and relied heavily on our IDEs to allow us debugging. Kotlin seems to be pretty popular in that space right now; if I haven't had some personal gripe with its authors I'd have probably used it as well ;-)

Good luck with your company, keep your eyes open for things to come! :)

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#74

Post by kapv89 »

bitL wrote: post #73
kapv89 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No problem. I usually learn a new language by picking a very challenging idea and then implementing it; that way I can see how the language performs "under stress", though I might have skewed view for normal use cases. Still, companies seem to be more interested in the weird cases I am forced to explore (much to detriment of my happiness), and JavaScript was making me quite grumpy at times. Right, with TensorFlow.js…

Thanks!

And by the way, using python for training is a must right now(though JS is going to become an alternate for this in a few months, as tensorflow.js is being ported to node with bindings to actual tensorflow's C++ layer). Using tensorflow.js, I'd have been able to use saved models in the browser.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#75

Post by abritinthebay »

jpfed wrote: post #31
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.

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.

> I hate imperatively constructing "types" through prototypal inheritance

You hate objects... basically?

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#76

Post by abritinthebay »

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?

Right, I agree but every time someone talks about tighter integration with the browser it really, under the hood, requires DOM access.

Because it does basically everything else (or is spec'd to).

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#77

Post by kapv89 »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #72
paulhodge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice straw man argument. You don't need to be a special genius to be proficient with 2 languages.

You need to be a genius to use two languages well in a single software while at the same time working on figuring out how to solve the constant barrage of new business problems that an enterprise software product needs to solve in the early stages.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#79

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

kapv89 wrote: post #77
tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice straw man argument. You don't need to be a special genius to be proficient with 2 languages.

You need to be a genius to use two languages well in a single software while at the same time working on figuring out how to solve the constant barrage of new business problems that an enterprise software product needs to solve in the early stages.

If you say so. :|

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#80

Post by jpfed »

abritinthebay wrote: post #75
jpfed wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I hate imperatively constructing "types" through prototypal inheritance You hate objects... basically?

While objects are overrated, that's not what I'm talking about here. I didn't say "imperatively constructing objects of a type", I said "imperatively constructing types".

This has likely changed since I last used javascript, but in the bad old days, if you wanted to specify a "type" (in the structural sense- a common set of fields that you might construct instances of), you build that type with statements rather than declarations. That feels icky. Also, that means that any potential IDE has to interpret your code (rather than simply parsing declarations) to provide any real support for you, which meant it took forever for IDEs to provide things like autocomplete (let alone foolproof renaming).

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