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

201–210 of 459 posts

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#201

Post by kozhevnikov »

cirgue wrote: post #191
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.

I will abandon my skepticism of JavaScript as soon as JavaScript boosters abandon their infomercialesque “millions of people can’t be wrong!” attitude and make a compelling case for the language itself. JavaScript is all we have for web dev which is why it’s so popular. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fundamentally flawed language, it just means that no one has been able to popularize better solutions because of network…

What is the fundamental flaw in JavaScript language?

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#202

Post by polskibus »

thelarkinn wrote: post #92

Hi there, original tweeter here. Just to clarify: no one said when this work would land, simply that we are working on it! Sorry to disappoint XD, but I guess blame the OP.

Does that mean full, desktop version of Office 365 or only the web browser versions of Excel, etc?

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#203

Post by jhall1468 »

bitL wrote: post #177
xamuel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most language features, really. Name a few. >terrible "prototype" system >malice that is "this" It sounds like you are talking about ES5, not ES6+

Can you guarantee all ES6- code to disappear immediately? Or are you forced to dive deep into warts when you have to work on some older JS project?

Wow, now we're complaining about the outdated versions of a language? Come on man. Nobody is going to write a modern application in ES5 and there are plenty of warts in old Java, C and Python applications as well. That's the nature of them being "old".

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#204

Post by xamuel »

StavrosK wrote: post #187
xamuel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most language features, really. Name a few. >terrible "prototype" system >malice that is "this" It sounds like you are talking about ES5, not ES6+

> Name a few. He did, literally exactly after that sentence.

No, he listed some things that he thinks are broken, he didn't list missing language features

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#205

Post by giancarlostoro »

artmageddon wrote: post #169
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.

Reading this thread, with all the Javascript talk, makes me feel like I should be scared of continuing to be a C# developer..

Don't think that'll be an issue. Just sad to not see .NET Core finally get a UI layer added on. They're investing in ASP .NET Core its a nice back-end ecosystem.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#206

Post by dentemple »

thelarkinn wrote: post #92

Hi there, original tweeter here. Just to clarify: no one said when this work would land, simply that we are working on it! Sorry to disappoint XD, but I guess blame the OP.

Does this mean that VBA will finally die?

Please tell me that VBA will finally die.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#207

Post by cmiles74 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #77
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…

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…

I think this is a really important point. Every browser vendor has spent huge amounts of dollars to increase the performance of Javascript. I don't know if there's another language that has enjoyed this level of investment... Maybe Java is closest, there are multiple companies working on their own VM implementations.

The reason so much has been spent on Javascript: it runs in the web browser. For sure, people have found other reasons to like Javascript but at the bottom of the pile, money was spent because it was in the browser and the browser vendors wanted the browser to do more.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#208

Post by dm319 »

F_r_k wrote: post #106
chris_wot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example spreadsheet that shows the slowness in LibreOffice?

Try plotting a 2x10000 range in libreoffice. Takes > 2 Mon just to render the graph. I'd be happy to provide the CSV to anyone interested

I've found the speed relates to the fileformat it is saved in. Might well still be slower, but in terms of speed ods > xls > xlsx for some reason.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#209

Post by _bxg1 »

Re: the original tweet

JavaScript is a real language now. It's powerful and performant and uses modern paradigms, in addition to its sheer relevance.

That said, I am glad I was taught using C++ in college. Not because I plan to ever write an OS or DBMS, but because it taught me valuable lessons about pointers, how memory is managed, how arrays and lists differ, and other computing fundamentals that still inform you when writing in higher-level languages, even if you don't have to deal with those concepts directly.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#210

Post by 0xcafecafe »

thelarkinn wrote: post #140
0xcafecafe wrote: post #118

I wonder how much of global warming is caused by inefficient code written in higher level languages requiring more powerful hardware to run. It might be infinitesimal but still non-zero.

Technically JavaScript is only ~7% slower then C++ to execute. But snipe away at that stats with real data.

Doesn't it depend on the benchmark? Yes, for some numeric problem as described here (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/algorithmic-performance-compa...), the 7% figure seems reasonable. But for a real world app with object creation/deletion, the C++ memory model at a lower level would provide a much better performance over a garbage collected higher level one.

And even if (hypotheically) the performance difference a constant 7%, that is still a tangible cost.

Post reply on HN