51–60 of 231 posts
Enough with the no-context-attached slides already. Seriously, if you don't have a recording of the talk, or a transcript, at least provide an article or something.
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It does not however, preclude the possibility that the tool is in fact a bad tool, and that the tool is bizarrely the only tool we have. They say poorly skilled people blame their tools, and that highly skilled people who know their tools well, will know how to use it well. That being said, see that circular saw over there that will occasionally bounce and cut off its user's fingers? I'm not gonna use it, no matter h…
Yeah JavaScript has problems, so do all programming languages. JS has some particularly egregious ones, but the abuses and problems the slide complains about are not a symptom of a defect with JavaScript. They would be the same problems with any other language being used by incompetents.
Abuses and problems precisely show Javascript's defects. The more easily abusable a language is, the more defective it is.
A lot can be said about familiarity with the language. Many examples in wtfjs.com boils down to (mis)understanding the language itself. Let's call this the cognitive overhead of a language - the amount of corner cases you have to store in your head about a language.
Surely a language with high cognitive overheads is more abusable than languages that have low cognitive overheads.
Incompetent python, C, or even scheme programmers wouldn't be able to shoot themselves in the foot (by shooting themselves in the foot, I mean having unexpected results - even with Undefined behaviours) as much as incompetent javascript programmers. That's my beef. I currently have no way of empirically proving that, but my gut is leaning that way.
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Dart ( http://www.dartlang.org ) is a attempt by Google. Of course, probably no browser except Chrome (and Opera?) will ever have the Dart VM built-in, but Dart also compiles to javascript for those other browsers.
An issue with Dart is it does not support IE 8. IE 8 still ships with Windows 7 and it is quite popular. It's not reasonable to throw away all IE 8 traffic just to get Dart's features.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20130615...
IE10 has more usage. Hopefully, Win 8.1 is successful for Microsoft and XP usage drops significantly.
All the includes are insane as well. Run Noscript or any other JS blocker and visit a few big sites and you'll see that you end up running JS from half the Internet. I'm joking of course, but some sites have dozens of includes from other sites, advertisers, CDNs, etc.
I installed Ghostery but did not set up any filters; with just that, it shows how much external resources / from which external parties things are loaded. Some sites have like twenty external dependencies, and multiple analytics gathering scripts (which may get embedded via the iframes of advertisers).
I wonder if there'll ever be an alternative to Javascript. I'm not talking about those things that eventually get translated to Javascript, I'm talking about a native platform well thought-through and based on a typed language that isn't a mess. Yeah, I know: it's not Javascript that's broken, it's the DOM. I'd argue that both should be replaced by something else, otherwise the future will be 90% native mobile apps,…
Absolutely. Write in whatever language you like, compile to asm.js - that way you're running in the browser, at about half native speed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does not however, preclude the possibility that the tool is in fact a bad tool, and that the tool is bizarrely the only tool we have. They say poorly skilled people blame their tools, and that highly skilled people who know their tools well, will know how to use it well. That being said, see that circular saw over there that will occasionally bounce and cut off its user's fingers? I'm not gonna use it, no matter h…
People don't use javascript because it's a beautiful, well thought out language. They use it because it runs everywhere .
If Javascript were limited to The Good Parts alone, it has the potential to be a beautiful well thought out language. It would be quite close to a beautiful well thought out language
It's made worse by the fact that the model we have to base our GUIs off of is a based on hierarchal documents.
Clients never were reasonnable in their demands, nor did most of the site owner have good and simple tastes and care about efficiency, nor did half of the internet care about user experience first above everything else.
Saying that the use of js has because heavy handed is cool and fun, but for any serious discussion there should be more acknowledgment of why we are in this situation in the first place. I'm not sure it's so much worse than 5 years before, at least we can read most things on mobile devices.
As a side point, I've done project on ultra weak platforms were every js had to be hand written to gain speed and memory space. I wouldn't try to do the same on some cookie cutter corporate site with a 600k slideshow loading on the front page, where having easily replacable components and tried and true pieces to test on the 20 combinations of browsers is far more critical that cutting 20k of compressed script.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I installed Ghostery but did not set up any filters; with just that, it shows how much external resources / from which external parties things are loaded. Some sites have like twenty external dependencies, and multiple analytics gathering scripts (which may get embedded via the iframes of advertisers).
I work in advertising. I have seen Ghostery rack up close to 300 trackers before. Piggybacked pixels... they're everywhere