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

141–150 of 459 posts

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#141

Post by cm2187 »

maaark wrote: post #82
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!

UWP doesn't run on win7. If you think getting rid of WinXP was hard, wait to see the phasing out of Win7. If you write for the desktop, chances are you are writing an internal app. Lots of large enterprises (including my present employer) just switched to Win7. Win10 is a looong way ahead. A significant part of your userbase won't be able to touch a UWP app for a long time.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#143

Post by ksec »

One Day Microsoft made VSCode and everyone loves them.

The Second day Microsoft decide to buy GitHub and everyone were flocking off to Gitlab, everyone hates them.

Now they are moving to the biblical end of computing era by making every Javascript.

May be they will even Open Source the Windows Kernel some day.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#144

Post by osrec »

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.

It's about prevalence. The more prevalent a language is, the more the complainers come out in force. PHP is another language that has created billions of dollars of value, yet it doesn't stop the computer science purists from bashing it every other day. Just ignore the negativity and keep writing code in what makes sense to you.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#145

Post by tom_ »

workinthehead wrote: post #134
FridgeSeal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I threw billions of dollars of vested interest at Python/Ruby/COBOL/(insert language of your choice) we can probably make those run at JS speeds as well. Does that solve the fundamental drawbacks of the languages? Nope. No it does not. JavaScript is particularly egregious because of it's weird behaviour about types and coercion and you know, just silently failing, behaviour that I wouldn't want going on in any pro…

every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion, that's simply the nature of the beast. sure wish i knew what you are talking about w/r/t "silently failing". JS has working exceptions just like 99% of widely used languages. I'm very glad that you've been omniscient enough to determine what "proper" parallel support is, though. How's that working out for you? Meanwhile, those of us using Ja…

Probably this thing, easy to spot in isolation but much harder when part of a larger system:

   > x={}
   > x.fred
   undefined
Actively unhelpful!

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#146

Post by osullivj »

Amezarak wrote: post #130
cm2187 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another tweet on that thread: > how is that even possible? there are tons of legacy features in there, COM/OLE APIs, SDKs, plugin architecture, macro system, VBA interpreter, VBA IDE, graphing components etc. Almost 30 years of development. No way MS is going to rewrite all of that. (Maybe the "mobile" version) I think this is a strong indication that all these technologies are going away.

This would be suicide for Office. I struggle to believe that Microsoft is replacing the full Windows desktop version of Office with a version rewritten in JS. It makes no sense. Many, many, many businesses absolutely rely on the features you're mentioning, and many others that would be a tremendous undertaking to re-implement. There has to be something that's not being communicated right here. Maybe they mean the "li…

Strongly agree. Backwards compatibility has always been a strong suit for MS. Changing that stance is a major strategic shift, and IMHO would be a huge error, similar in scale to IBM's open PC architecture.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#147

Post by cm2187 »

paulie_a wrote: post #132
cm2187 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What creates hostility is the sentiment of being forced to use a bad language. There are many alternatives to python or php but none really to javascript (transpilers hacks apart). Webassembly might change that. The only other language that I have seen generating as much hostility is vb6, and also I believe because some developpers found themselves forced to use it.

Also VB 6 syntax was complete shit.

Pretty much any old language has an odd and inconsistent syntax. I am getting into python now and it feels so much like doing VBA.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#148

Post by redleggedfrog »

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.

"Pretty sure we're up to billions of technical debt created by software written in Javascript."

There, I fixed that for you. I didn't miss the boat. I've had to maintain mountains of awful code written by careless programmers in a pathetic language with a morass of constantly changing libraries for run-times (web browsers) that can't even be counted on to interpret the code the same.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#149

Post by bunderbunder »

ksec wrote: post #143

One Day Microsoft made VSCode and everyone loves them. The Second day Microsoft decide to buy GitHub and everyone were flocking off to Gitlab, everyone hates them. Now they are moving to the biblical end of computing era by making every Javascript. May be they will even Open Source the Windows Kernel some day.

If, by "everyone", you mean "everyone as in everyone who's currently having strong enough feelings about this thing to make a bunch of noise about it on the Internet." Which is probably a much smaller and more variable set than "everyone as in every single person."

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#150

Post by JCSato »

morrbo wrote: post #142

Why not C#? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity to feed some of the APIs undoubtedly created for this into the new .net core stuff. I guess i'll just keep dreaming of the day when i can reliably convert a docx into a pdf without using office interop.

This is the confusing part for me, yes. Javascript is fine and well, but C# seems the better choice in general here.
Post reply on HN