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Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

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Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#151

Post by pdpi »

Brass wrote: post #137
arghwhat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why the shot at COBOL here? COBOL's creation of "real world value" by comparison is hardly a low bar: https://thenewstack.io/cobol-everywhere-will-maintain/

COBOL was the state of the art when it was designed, but any evolution on top of that is, by necessity, limited by a 60-year-old core design. While it _has_ produced a lot of real world value in the almost 6 decades of its existence, starting a new project in COBOL would be ill-advised.

Existing projects were written in whatever language for whatever reasons, it's "Would I start a project in this language today?" that's the bar to beat in terms of language "quality" and, in that sense, COBOL is a fairly low bar for most domains.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#153

Post by codingdave »

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…

"real world value" is a completely fair metric. You might be able to argue that different languages offer more value than JS, for different use cases. But mocking the idea of "real world value" seems to completely miss the underlying point of app development -- which is to deliver value.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#155

Post by bunderbunder »

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.

I'm guessing that in this case they're only talking about the "office software running in the browser" version of Office 365, not the "subscription pricing model for the desktop suite" version.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#156

Post by osrec »

gizmo wrote: post #139
em500 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a "real" language, it's just not a terribly good or fast one "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup

"There are only two kinds of file systems. Those that corrupt your data eventually and those nobody uses." Luckily, filesystem designers worked hard at making their filesystems journaling, fault tolerant, and more. And we stopped complaining angrily about filesystems ruining weeks (or months) of work, because it stopped being a regular occurrence. We still complain about the flaws of C++ because they are a constant s…

I don't think he's saying the criticisms are invalid, but just that they are at the forefront of more people's minds because the respective language is more prevalent. Languages that are barely used also have their problems - they are just undiscovered or spoken about less.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#157

Post by dkns »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #148
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.

"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.

As opposed to The One Language that is perfect and doesn't incur technical debt when programs are written in it.

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#158

Post by pjc50 »

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 very much in the same state that VB was, or even "Excel programming" is today: it certainly works and it certainly produces a lot of business value. It's just that the downsides appear further down the road; maintainbility and scalability issues, or intrinsic conversion causing data loss. That kind of thing.

Every time someone waits for an Electron app to load, or watches it eat their ram? That gets added to the prejudice scale. Every overly-slow page load that eats mobile battery. The feeling that "it doesn't have to be this way" is very strong.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#159

Post by xamuel »

arghwhat wrote: post #74
nawgszy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's just not a terribly good or fast one From everything I've seen, its performance sits just below Java (4x slower, perhaps) on some standard algorithms or tasks, and significantly faster than languages like Ruby, Python, etc.. I never see hate for those languages like for JS, so I'll disregard that. >not terribly good This one never has made sense. What is it missing that makes you hate it so? I think it has rath…

> (4x slower, perhaps) "4x" is a lot slower, and a lot of things are much worse than this. You have to have deep knowledge of the VM (such as knowing how "hidden classes" work in V8) to be able to get JS close to Java. > so I'll disregard that. You shouldn't. Claiming a JIT'ed language is fast due to being faster than Python, an entirely interpreted language, is like saying a moped is a fast vehicle because it's fast…

>Most language features, really.

Name a few.

>terrible "prototype" system

>malice that is "this"

It sounds like you are talking about ES5, not ES6+

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#160

Post by TeMPOraL »

hellofunk wrote: post #114
DougN7 wrote: post #98

Ugggh :( I miss my old Outlook 2013. Outlook 2016 is so slow it can’t keep up wirh my typing. I thought it already was javascript. Guess it will be even slower still. Super! (not)

Really the choice of language is unlikely to be the cause of any slowness you are experiencing in different versions. JS can be faster than a native experience, all depends on program architecture. The main JS engines are blazing fast and a low-latency UI is perfectly possible; sluggishness is not a sacrifice you must accept when coding in nearly any language in 2018. But bad practices in any language can lead to a p…

Technically true, but in practice, the culture matters. JS ecosystem is what it is - based on past and current experience, you can't expect efficiency coming from there.
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