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ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

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Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#271

Post by antonvs »

likeclockwork wrote: post #269
antonvs wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think "objective" means? The comparative approach I mentioned can be used to eliminate personal feelings about such issues - not in all cases (types might be an example), but certainly in some. Many users of Javascript, including myself, recognize that it has many weaknesses. There's even a book that acknowledges this in its title: "Javascript: The Good Parts." Denying this seems to be denying objective r…

What do YOU think "objective" means? None of the properties you're talking about are objective. Objective doesn't mean Crockford wrote a book about it or "lots of people agree with me". Objective means factual. You're putting the word "objective" in front of your own and others opinions to arrogate the credibility of objectivity onto statements that are not based in observation of material reality. More people holdin…

You can just look up some dictionary definitions, like "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts." I've explained how that applies in this case - we can use comparative analysis to draw factual conclusions.

Focusing on the specific word "terrible" is a bit silly. Sure, it's hyperbolic, but I used it as a way to capture the idea that Javascript has many features that are comparatively worse at achieving their goals than equivalent features in many other languages. This is something that can be analyzed and measured, producing facts.

Crockford's book title is simply an example of how even a strong advocate of Javascript recognizes its weaknesses. You may not understand how it's possible for it to objectively have weaknesses, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. In this case an objectively bad feature would be one that has negative consequences for programmers, and can be replaced by a features that can achieve the same goals more effectively, without those negative consequences.

If there's anyone who'll argue in favor of such features on technical rather than historical grounds, then it would certainly undermine the objectivity claim. But the point is that there are (mis)features in Javascript which no-one defends on technical grounds. That is a reflection of underlying objective facts.

I'm also not making some sort of ad populum argument. As I pointed out, any claim of objective fact has to be made in some context that provides it with semantics. In some languages, the expression "1"+"1" is a type error, in others it produces "11". Both of those outcomes are objective facts in some context. What your objection really amounts to is saying that there's no semantic context in which my claim could be true. That's clearly not the case.

Perhaps a different example would help: people don't write programs any more by toggling binary codes into machines via switches. That's because we've come up with approaches that are objectively more effective. We can factually measure the improvements in question. The features I was referring to fall into the same category.

I'm going to repeat the closing from my last comment, because you're still doing the same thing:

You can of course quibble with such claims, based on a rigid application of a simplistic set of definitions. But you'd do better to try to understand the truth conveyed by the claims, and engage with that.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#272

Post by antonvs »

emteycz wrote: post #242
sergeykish wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a complete novice, funboy or the one who knows only JS. There are many issues, it is possible not to touch or to work around them, TS and flow helps. JS solved just a few — 'use strict', strict comparison, arrow functions, string literals. Core problems still there — implicit types, prototype declarations, number is float, toString/inspect division, typeof null. Every javascript programmer has to walk…

Lol. I've been programming for a decade in many languages including assembly, C#, Rust, Lisp, Prolog, F# and more, focusing on JS in the last 5 years. Virtually no one writes plain JavaScript, most people including me write TypeScript, but Babel with extensions is normally used. Your reply exhibits your ignorance of the JS world.

> Virtually no one writes plain JavaScript

Which is because plain Javascript is objectively terrible, as I pointed out.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#273

Post by [deleted] »

antonvs wrote: post #271
likeclockwork wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do YOU think "objective" means? None of the properties you're talking about are objective. Objective doesn't mean Crockford wrote a book about it or "lots of people agree with me". Objective means factual. You're putting the word "objective" in front of your own and others opinions to arrogate the credibility of objectivity onto statements that are not based in observation of material reality. More people holdin…

You can just look up some dictionary definitions, like "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts." I've explained how that applies in this case - we can use comparative analysis to draw factual conclusions. Focusing on the specific word "terrible" is a bit silly. Sure, it's hyperbolic, but I used it as a way to capture the idea that Javascript has many features that are co…

[deleted]

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#274

Post by FullyFunctional »

kevingadd wrote: post #248
FullyFunctional wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WASM is _designed_ to be easily jitted, without the expensive machinery we had to put in place to do this for x86, so the whole point is not require a new architecture. Because of this I find WASM to be the best direction yet for a "universal ISA" as it's very feasible to translate to most strange new radical architecture (like EDGE, Prodigy, etc). (Introducing a new ISA is almost impossible due to the cost of portin…

"WASM is _designed_ to be easily jitted, without the expensive machinery we had to put in place to do this for x86" I'm not sure this is actually true, given that the original intent was for WASM to be easy to compile using existing JS infrastructure , not in general. So given that, it would make sense to carry over JS fp->int semantics into WASM. WASM is in effect a successor to asm.js. It's certainly also not too h…

True, but wasn't my point with "expensive machinery". By that I was referring to

  * discovering which instructions are executed (tracking  control flow),
  * mapping x86 code addresses to translated addresses,
  * discovering the shape of the CFG and finding loops,
  * purging translations that get invalidated by overwrites (like self-modifying code),
  * sprinkling the translated code full of guards so we can make assumptions about the original code
etc. All this is unnecessary for WASM and you can in fact make a quick and dirty one-pass translation for the 1st gear. I don't know, but it seems reasonable that they would keep the same FP->Int semantics as JS, but you rarely do that in non-JS code.

EDIT: fail to make bullets, oh well.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#275

Post by mr_toad »

MereInterest wrote: post #204
leptons wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's your opinion. I find javascript quite enjoyable and easy to use, without producing errors. YMMV.

I'd love to have a way to take a `Date` object and set it as the value of a `datetime-local` input. Sure feels like that should be straightforward to do, without requiring any weird conversions like it does.

You might be interested in http://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/index.html

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#276

Post by likeclockwork »

antonvs wrote: post #271
likeclockwork wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do YOU think "objective" means? None of the properties you're talking about are objective. Objective doesn't mean Crockford wrote a book about it or "lots of people agree with me". Objective means factual. You're putting the word "objective" in front of your own and others opinions to arrogate the credibility of objectivity onto statements that are not based in observation of material reality. More people holdin…

You can just look up some dictionary definitions, like "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts." I've explained how that applies in this case - we can use comparative analysis to draw factual conclusions. Focusing on the specific word "terrible" is a bit silly. Sure, it's hyperbolic, but I used it as a way to capture the idea that Javascript has many features that are co…

Again, you think I am disagreeing with your opinion by pointing out that it is an opinion and not a matter of fact. You're only continuing to restate your opinion and insist it is fact.

Claims of objective facts? Objective facts in some context? Badness isn't a matter of fact--it's a matter of opinion, I say again, you're making a value judgement and asserting that as a fact. You may as well tell me an onion is a planet and I can live on it if I believe hard enough.

You think I am disparaging your argument by saying it is mere opinion as though they isn't good enough to be real true fact. I am not, I am merely pointing out that your statement is actually an opinion which you are incorrectly claiming to be a fact.

> I'm also not making some sort of ad populum argument. As I pointed out, any claim of objective fact has to be made in some context that provides it with semantics. In some languages, the expression "1"+"1" is a type error, in others it produces "11". Both of those outcomes are objective facts in some context. What your objection really amounts to is saying that there's no semantic context in which my claim could be true. That's clearly not the case.

"Objective fact" isn't claimed. You seem to be missing that an opinion even if backed up by evidence still isn't itself a fact and thus isn't objective. This isn't a matter of context. The difference between opinion and fact is not like the difference between true and false.

I don't know how you're lost on this. "JS is bad" is an opinion. "JS is objectively bad" is still an opinion but claims to be a fact, because "badness" isn't an objective property. Whether or not something is bad is not a matter of fact, it's a matter of opinion.

The "+" operator performs both string concatenation and addition in JS. The "+" operator being overloaded to perform string concatenation and addition with implicit type coercion is bad. <-- That's an opinion. While anyone can observe the behavior, they have to make a judgement on whether or not it is desirable and desirability is not a matter of fact.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#277

Post by MereInterest »

mr_toad wrote: post #275
MereInterest wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to have a way to take a `Date` object and set it as the value of a `datetime-local` input. Sure feels like that should be straightforward to do, without requiring any weird conversions like it does.

You might be interested in http://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/index.html

Wow. `zonedDateTimeISO` looks like exactly what I was hoping for. I'm kind of surprised that there isn't anything analogous to `strftime`, though.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#278

Post by FridgeSeal »

pwdisswordfish4 wrote: post #171
FridgeSeal wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We need more performance, should we fix the underlying performance problem in our software? No, we should design our CPU’s to accommodate our slow, bottlenecked language!” Asking for CPU features to speed up Python is like trying to strap a rocket to horse and cart. Not the best way to go faster. We should focus on language design and tooling that makes it easier to write in “fast” languages, rather than bending ove…

> “fast” languages What are those?

C++, Rust, .Net would qualify, Go (doesn’t have a “release mode as such, but achieved decent speed), Julia, etc

Anything that makes an actual attempt at optimising for performance.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#279

Post by aidenn0 »

tatersolid wrote: post #256
aidenn0 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me realize this is true now. Through the 80s it was the other way around. You counted as having a language with a spec, even if there was no implementation, but an implementation without a spec was a "toy"

> Through the 80s it was the other way around. You counted as having a language with a spec, even if there was no implementation, but an implementation without a spec was a "toy" Not to my recollection. I don’t recall anyone at uni discussing a C standard until 1989, and even by 2000 few compilers were fully compliant with that C89 spec. There were so many incompatible dialects of FORTRAN 77 that most code had to be…

C was specified by K&R in 1978. Pascal had a specification for the core language, and BASIC was largely seen as a toy.

Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name

#280

Post by leptons »

eecc wrote: post #216
leptons wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's your opinion. I find javascript quite enjoyable and easy to use, without producing errors. YMMV.

Sure, until you parachute into a code base where several generations of contractors added features that communicate over a shared global object. This is bad per-se, but becomes worse when your language allows one to add fields on the fly and you end up with this container full of similar fields because eventually nobody knows exactly what’s in the object any more...

And that seems pretty simple to fix. "The same level of awareness that created a problem cannot be used to fix the problem" - and maybe that's why they hired you, to fix these problems. I've been that guy before. What was really fun was the codebase I had to fix that used mexican slang words as variable names, and I only speak English. So much fun. But I sucked it up, accepted the challenge, and I improved it.

It really doesn't take a super-genius to code javascript simply, efficiently, and without errors. Funny that a lot of programmers that think they're very smart are the ones that either shit on javascript, or make a lot of stupid errors with it, or both.

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