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Deno raises $21M

deno.com

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Re: Deno raises $21M

#271

Post by paulgb »

emilsedgh wrote: post #263
alephnan wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous I agree here, but > Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of a game-changer. If I'm starting a new project, Deno will be compelling if it means zero configuration with sufficiently sane defaults. It's like Rails vs Ruby. With Node.JS, you can pick and cho…

What makes node _fantastic_ is actually a huge ecosystem of packages, tooling, cloud providers, talent pool, shared knowledge. etc. There's a massive network effect here. As far as I'm concerned, as of right now Deno is _not_ better that node due to reasons above. It has the potential to be, and I wish the authors massive success and root for them. But I'm not gonna start a project on Deno due to lack of a proper eco…

At this point I’d say node’s ecosystem of packages is an advantage, but its ecosystem of tooling is a disadvantage. It’s not node’s fault, but Javascript package management wasn’t a thing when it started out, and now we are still haunted by the legacy approaches of the past. I’ve wasted too many hours mucking with babel/webpack/tsconfig files just to get some stupid code to run.

If there’s any area of modern software development that could benefit from a clean slate like Deno is attempting, it’s JS development.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#272

Post by oofbey »

JavaScript is popular because of browsers not because it is in any way a good language. Name another popular language with half its quirks.

WASM will eventually spell the end of JavaScript’s hegemony as it becomes easier to build web apps in other languages. So good luck Deno. You’re betting on a sinking ship.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#273

Post by int_19h »

spencerchubb wrote: post #209
jaredcwhite wrote: post #199

The rise of JavaScript-only clouds intended as "defacto" solutions for web development scares the hell out of me. Monocultures are dangerous. At least in the early Node era, it sat alongside all the other flavors of server infra out there with a near-infinite variety of languages, platforms, OSes. Now we're being told that the future of web development is…Deno? That's it? One tool? One language? One platform? Not the…

Deno is only possible because V8 is so hyper-optimized. If you think about it, V8 has to compile/interpret and then run javascript code on the fly after downloading it in the browser. That's how good V8 is. That puts javascript in a unique position to enable something like Deno So if there was a compiler/interpreter for another language that was close to being as good as V8, then something like this could exist for o…

There are many compiled languages that produce more performant code than V8. As you noted yourself yourself, V8 has time constraints - it must be able to compile and run the code "fast enough" for a web page to load. This limits the extent of optimizations that it can perform.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#274

Post by int_19h »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #246
vlunkr wrote: post #69

This question is going to make me sound like a jerk, but why do you want to write your back-end in JS? Deno looks like a great improvement over node.js, but I don't feel compelled to use it. It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like…

- Javascript's async-everything is rather unique. - Synchronous execution + async-everything is a great combo. - First class Promise abstraction. - Good general purpose language. Its warts are mostly smoothed over. It's not like Javascript from 20 years ago. I like writing Javascript. I certainly prefer it over the other popular dynamically typed languages. (I don't see what Ruby or Python offer me over JS as general…

.NET / C# have all of the above, and had them for longer than JS did.

(promise abstraction since 2010, async/await since 2012)

Re: Deno raises $21M

#275

Post by int_19h »

spoils19 wrote: post #172
l30n4da5 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the source of node it’s just a bunch of function from pre-ES4 Old code does not mean bad code. Seems like a silly thing to look at, honestly. A bunch of java was written pre-java8, does that make it all bad? No, no it doesnt.

In most scenarios, new ways of writing the same code is a waste of time. I actively discourage use of things like type inference in newer Java versions as it goes against the purity of the original vision of the language. It's a detriment to mental agility, and it also makes scores of incredibly useful, deep books and learning resources outdated and useless.

How exactly does incessantly repeating yourself, in situations where the compiler is already perfectly aware what you're supposed to say, a "detriment to mental agility"?

And how does it make books and learning resources outdated and useless? Old code still works exactly the same as it always did.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#276

Post by qbasic_forever »

oofbey wrote: post #272

JavaScript is popular because of browsers not because it is in any way a good language. Name another popular language with half its quirks. WASM will eventually spell the end of JavaScript’s hegemony as it becomes easier to build web apps in other languages. So good luck Deno. You’re betting on a sinking ship.

C++ _easily_ has many if not more quriks than JS. There have been over a half dozen major revisions of the language since ~1988. Each one added in sometimes dramatic ways new syntax or idioms that required major relearning. If you learned and used C++ in 1995 you would be a liability if thrown into a modern 2015+ C++ codebase (well a liability until you learn all the new quirks and changes in the language).

You might drop into a C++ codebase from 1990 that looks more like C (it was made to be mostly backwards compatible after all), then see a codebase from 1999 that's chock full of the most cryptic template metaprogramming imagingable and complete spaghetti structure of OO "design patterns", and then see a codebase from 2010 making much more heavy use of the updated standard library and a functional style of programming.

The sheer scope of C++ as a language is frightening as it requires quite deep knowledge of the parts you're using. Sometimes even deep knowledge of the history and rationale for parts of the language you're using existing. And if you screw something up you might silently introduce a major security hole, OS crash, or worse--the language gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself from.

Oh and there's no standard build system, no standard package manager, no standard project layout, no standard for code formatting, documentation, etc. Everyone has their own bespoke solutions that make the JS world look amazing in contrast.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#277

Post by claytongulick »

javajosh wrote: post #254
hombre_fatal wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Javascript's async-everything is rather unique. - Synchronous execution + async-everything is a great combo. - First class Promise abstraction. - Good general purpose language. Its warts are mostly smoothed over. It's not like Javascript from 20 years ago. I like writing Javascript. I certainly prefer it over the other popular dynamically typed languages. (I don't see what Ruby or Python offer me over JS as general…

>Python, Ruby I like js too, but both python and ruby are much better languages. It's just that js won distribution, which means it won adoption, which means you have 10MM devs smoothing it's rough edges. Just to take one language feature, consider pythons list and map comprehensions. js has nothing like that - but it also has 10 high quality libraries that do that and more, like lodash. Consider also the ridiculousn…

> the misfeature of prototypal inheretance

Prototypal inheritance isn't a misfeature, it's an interesting and powerful language design choice used by several different languages [1]

It may not be your cup of tea, but having written code in most mainstream languages since the 80's, I can tell you I definitely prefer it to alternatives like class based inheritance.

Runtime mixins are one of the most powerful composable concepts in any language, and this is a breeze with js. Take a look at the hoops c# had to jump through to come up with something similar but less powerful, as an example. Or the nightmare of multiple inheritance in C++.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype-based_programming

Re: Deno raises $21M

#278

Post by oofbey »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #276
oofbey wrote: post #272

JavaScript is popular because of browsers not because it is in any way a good language. Name another popular language with half its quirks. WASM will eventually spell the end of JavaScript’s hegemony as it becomes easier to build web apps in other languages. So good luck Deno. You’re betting on a sinking ship.

C++ _easily_ has many if not more quriks than JS. There have been over a half dozen major revisions of the language since ~1988. Each one added in sometimes dramatic ways new syntax or idioms that required major relearning. If you learned and used C++ in 1995 you would be a liability if thrown into a modern 2015+ C++ codebase (well a liability until you learn all the new quirks and changes in the language). You might…

True, and, C++ is popular in that people use it. But I don't think many people really like it.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#280

Post by worik »

"JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language."

WTF? How is that even slightly true?

C is the universal scripting language, in exactly the same way.

Nothing happening in this space makes any sense to me.

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