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It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

javascript.tm

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Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#161

Post by lelanthran »

Vinnl wrote: post #146
giancarlostoro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.

An important feature of TypeScript is identifying problems in your code before the user runs it, i.e. before a browser even comes into play.

So? If supported natively by the browser the browser could compile it on download.

You'll still get all the strong typing without have to wait for it to run.

For example an error in a little used branch would cause an error before the branch even runs.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#162

Post by afavour »

GaryBluto wrote: post #91
afavour wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't beat City Hall This broadcast was brought to you by the Better Things Aren’t Possible Party

Because trying to do the impossible has gone down so well in history and politics.

My go to example for stuff like this is the Labour Party in the UK. For hundreds upon hundreds of years it was a two party country, between the Whigs and the Tories, later the Liberals and Conservatives.

At the turn of the 20th century the working class and trade union movement created their own party, the Labour Party. At the time I’m sure many people said it would be impossible to challenge the existing duopoly, that it was a waste of time to even try, etc etc.

By 1929 they were the largest party in the House of Commons. In 1945 they won the majority. It wasn’t an overnight victory. But a lot of people put in a lot of hard work because they believed a better future was possible and their effort paid off.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#163

Post by nunobrito »

siwatanejo wrote: post #3

I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.

I'm from the java world and it is basically java. Sure that it can do a lot more, for the most part any java developer will fell at home with the exception of lacking a robust static typing and the IDEs aren't really as good to spot syntax errors. I mean no shade to javascript developers, you just get used to a very robust building environment over there.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#164

Post by singhrac »

heretia wrote: post #99
embedding-shape wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). Probably if we were in the early 2000s this could have been a battle worth fighting. But considering we're in 2025 and probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point, even when you're deep in enterprise-land, I'm not sure it'd be less confusing. Anyways, you're about two dec…

> probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point All the same, I probably get as many calls from recruiters to fill Java positions as I do JS positions. I've never used the former, and explaining it is always awkward!

To be frank this is a service to you. No company you want to work at has a recruiter that doesn't understand the difference (a fully AI recruiter would be better than this experience).

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#165

Post by nunobrito »

brabel wrote: post #129
mikepurvis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language now called Groovy would have been JavaScript if the name wasn’t already taken.

Haha completely agree, it is the "scripting language" made in the image of Java! It's a great language by the way!

There was also beanshell if you remember, of course never as polished nor adopted like groovy but it was also fun to use.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#166

Post by dtagames »

siwatanejo wrote: post #3

I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.

I think most of us just call it JS now. And we really write mostly TS anyway.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#169

Post by ridethelightnin »

This has so many unintended consequences for LLM over the next four years I would think.

"JavaScript" tokenizes to 2 tokens (BPE). "ECMAScript" tokenizes to 3. No biggie here.

But the real cost isn't training—it's inference. Every time an LLM has to reconcile "ES6" with "JavaScript," explain the naming, or reason through "user said JavaScript but docs say ECMAScript"— Hidden chain-of-thought overhead. Clarification tokens.

Back of envelope: ~376M JS-related LLM queries/day globally. ~30% trigger some clarification overhead. That's ~5B extra tokens/day, ~1.85T tokens/year.

At ~0.000025 kWh/token inference cost, that's ~46 GWh/year.

~23,000 tonnes CO2 annually. ~200,000 tonnes over 4 years, based on rough growth of LLM use, and terms sticking around on both names over 4 years - probably wrong here too.

Sources

Token counts: OpenAI tiktoken cl100k_base encoder 2.5B ChatGPT queries/day: Sam Altman, July 2025 [1] ~4.7B total LLM interactions/day: aggregated from ChatGPT + Gemini (2B monthly AI Overviews users) + Copilot + Claude + others [2][3] JS = 62% of developers: Stack Overflow 2024 Survey [4] 8% of queries JS-related: my estimate based on language prevalence 30% clarification rate: my estimate - probably way off Energy/token: ~0.000025 kWh blended from Luccioni et al. and Patterson et al. inference estimates [5]

CO2: 0.5 kg/kWh global grid average

[1] techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/chatgpt-users-send-2-5-billion-prompts-a-day [2] demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics [3] sqmagazine.co.uk/chatgpt-vs-google-gemini-statistics [4] survey.stackoverflow.co/2024 [5] arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 (BLOOM carbon footprint paper)

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#170

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

bayindirh wrote: post #120
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that a copyright issue? I thought the point of contention is that Google allegedly copied Oracle's API design when they re-wrote Java for Android.

Wouldn't Microsoft do the same thing when somebody copies the language and names it "TypedWebBrowserScriptbutFree"?

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...

The license is Apache 2.0. With the trademark, they can tell everyone not to call their thing TypeScript but at this point, given the license, they can't tell them not to copy it and change it and distribute that new thing (assuming the new distributors do so under the correct conditions).

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