Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
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Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
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Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#2Fuck, no. Everyone's free to make better tooling, but don't standardize it. There's no point. It'll only lead to further fragmentation. Libraries and frameworks will be split between plain JS and whatever this new version will be called. Just freeze the language and be done.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#3The problem expressed is fundamentally correct, but the proposed solution is a band-aid, which is worse than not solving the problem at all. The fix provides a long term change with short term benefits. Reliance on tooling will continue to make code instances are the progressively larger and slower until we arrive at this problem again. At some point JavaScript must become a professional language written by adults, people capable of self-organization and measurement, and not be the subject of fashion by people who aren't qualified to program in the first place.
If performance and complexity really are the primary concerns then the language must stop pandering to children. We already know what high performance looks like. I wrote about it here: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/performance...
If the goal really is higher performance and lower complexity the most desirable solution is to create a new language with forced simplicity directly in the image of JavaScript, where simple means less and not easy, and transition to that new language slowly over time. Yes, I understand Google went down this road in the past with Dart, but Dart solved for all the wrong problems and thus was dead on arrival. Instead the idea is to take something that works well and shave off all the bullshit reducing it down to the smallest possible thing.
Forced simplicity means absolutely ignoring all vanity/stylistic concerns and instead only focusing on fewer ways of doing things. As an example consider a language that requires strong typing like TypeScript and thus thereby eliminates type coercion. Another example is operators that have a single purpose (not overloaded), single character, and no redundant operators.
Will there be a lot of crying about vanity bullshit... yes, absolutely. Just ignore it because, you cannot reasonably expect to drive above 120mph on a child's tricycle. If people wish to offer their own stylistic considerations they should include performance metrics and explanations how their suggestions reduce quantity of operations without unnecessary abstraction.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#4Better to focus on WebAssembly instead. Bring every language to the web.
JavaScript for some scripting, any other language for bigger applications.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#5Better to focus on WebAssembly instead. Bring every language to the web. JavaScript for some scripting, any other language for bigger applications.
good point. in a sense webassembly is that minimal very performant language. let javascript and typescript compile to webassembly, and you essentially got what is being proposed here
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#6JavaScript is two languages:
1) JavaScript, the original assembly language of the internet, does not need new language features.
2) JavaScript, the front-end web development language is a fractal of infinitely many sub-languages that transpile back to ES5.
The proposal, as I read it, is: Let's stop adding front-end web features to the assembly language; it doesn't get easier, better or faster if we change the underlying, slowly adopting and hard-to-optimize foundation.
When you want a new language feature, add it to the fractal part that transpiles back to the part well-supported and highly optimized in existing runtimes. The only loss is that you need to transpile, so your build pipeline becomes non-trivial. But it's either "code assembly" or "get a modern build tool".
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#7I really don't like it as it is difficult to debug code when the code that runs isn't the code I wrote.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#8Better to focus on WebAssembly instead. Bring every language to the web. JavaScript for some scripting, any other language for bigger applications.
good point. in a sense webassembly is that minimal very performant language. let javascript and typescript compile to webassembly, and you essentially got what is being proposed here
WebAssembly could replace JavaScript, the assembly language, once it has reached feature parity.
But there's still far to go. Large parts of the browser API are still not directly available in WASM.
I very much look forward to WASM reaching stability. It's very enjoyable to run Rust code in the browser.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#9No. Javascript should be split into 3 languages and html and css should be split into 20 languages.
Seriously frontend is already the most fragmented and fast changing area of web there is. Don’t split the language.
Re: Should JavaScript be split into two languages?
#10[deleted]