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

Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 459 posts

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#81

Post by sebazzz »

tluyben2 wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #27

It says that the the JavaScript is compiled to native code. That's not something you get from React Native today is it? Have they implemented a new native code compiler for JavaScript? I wonder what compiler technology it uses.

I was wondering that after reading more of the tweets; React native doesn’t compile the JS to native, so not sure what they are using to do all of that? Bit worried about the far superior languages C# and F# if they are not even dogfooding anymore.

It is not a question of dogfooding, it is a question of re-use. Office also needs to run in the web browser (Sharepoint, OneDrive)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#82

Post by maaark »

rbinv wrote: post #3

Office for Windows (WIN32) will be an Electron app? I have no words. edit, since there seems to be some confusion: I am explicitly talking about the WIN32 variant, which he confirmed to be based on Electron.

Nah it's fine, just upgrade to Win10 and buy your license through the windows store! UWP isn't using electron!

What's that? Win32 a second class citizen? Never!

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#83

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

I'll wait until it's done, released, and I have the opportunity to actually use it. Skype is already much worse than the original, so I really hope they don't go this way. I'm definitely not going to buy a 32GB notebook just to be able to use the most recent version of MS Office. (32 GB is nice BTW but a huge battery drain.)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#84

Post by FridgeSeal »

discordance wrote: post #17

Atwood's Law - "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

Can we skip to the bit where we start re-writing software that we re-wrote in JS in other, more appropriate languages? :P

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#85

Post by actsasbuffoon »

cm2187 wrote: post #70
capelio wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more real world evidence does HN need to see before the "JS isn't a real language" meme is abandoned? Pretty sure we're up to billions of real world value created by software written in Javascript. If you're still dismissive at this point, it's time to catch up. You've missed the boat.

Let's not confuse popularity (as in lots of users) and popularity (as in lots of love). Death and taxes are popular too! People write javascript because they have no other choice to run in the browser. I don't see that as a testimony that it is a great language.

If your only concern is the ergonomics of the language then there are lots of compile-to-JS languages. Some of them also compile to WebAssembly, which allows them to bypass the GC. It’s still not native speed, but it’s close enough for many applications.

There are pros and cons, but within the next few years it could become common to write in your language of choice, compile to WebAssembly, and ship an app that’s within roughly 50% of native speed.

I imagine JS will still be hugely popular even in that scenario, but that’s a different topic.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#86

Post by bitL »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #80
zippy5 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most devs who dislike it because it reduces the barrier to entry which undermines both their own prestige and quality of coworkers. Its similar to dislike of outsourcing in many ways. From a technical perspective, there are couple disadvantages in the long run that can make large codebases unmaintainable. In particular JS and PHP are resistant to static code analysis since they support functions like exec. So…

> I think most devs who dislike it because it reduces the barrier to entry which undermines both their own prestige and quality of coworkers. I think the prestige comment is a bit unfair, but today at work I had to educate a JS dev on what headers are in a HTTP request/request and some other pretty basic things (a dictionary/record type object and a JSON string are not the same thing for one). They were like "I know…

> produce something equally cool

I'd say they'd produce something massively cooler ;-)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#87

Post by bitL »

ekianjo wrote: post #20
cm2187 wrote: post #10

Excel is already a dog in term of realculating large spreadsheets. I think we will need Intel's 28 cores at 5GHz monster!

If you use Excel for large spreadsheets you are probably not using the right tool.

Pandas is slow. Hadoop is slow. Spark is slow. R is slow. What else is there?

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#88

Post by bitL »

capelio wrote: post #46
bitL wrote: post #5

Oh well, the kool-aid is strong. Next round of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away... Can somebody please design even worse language so that we can progress by reimplementing everything in it, keeping us occupied for the next 20 years?

How much more real world evidence does HN need to see before the "JS isn't a real language" meme is abandoned? Pretty sure we're up to billions of real world value created by software written in Javascript. If you're still dismissive at this point, it's time to catch up. You've missed the boat.

JS empowers beginners and disempowers advanced developers. If you are learning programming, JS helps you, if you need sensible pro-level features, you are out of luck.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#90

Post by mcphage »

arghwhat wrote: post #60
capelio wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more real world evidence does HN need to see before the "JS isn't a real language" meme is abandoned? Pretty sure we're up to billions of real world value created by software written in Javascript. If you're still dismissive at this point, it's time to catch up. You've missed the boat.

It's a "real" language, it's just not a terribly good or fast one. It's works decently when its use is limited to what it was made for: manipulating web pages. For anything else, the "designed on the back of a used piece of toilet paper" starts to shine through. And no, a JIT can't save you from this, it can only make things acceptable. That it can create "real world value" is an extremely low bar, which is passed by…

Not only is JavaScript a “real” language, it’s also a real language.
Post reply on HN