91–100 of 320 posts
Javascript doesn't support integers, so it doesn't seem like a good language for programming low level hardware. What about bit manipulation (XOR, AND, Shifting, etc)? This is critical for a lot of serial data communications and I/O controls.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
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No. I prefer C over JavaScript for embedded devices. And actually in most places, too. I know I'm weird, but I really like pointers, because I really like being able to manually setup data structures, and enjoy the power provided by pointers. Manual memory management isn't horribly fun, but for embedded devices I would rather be in charge of that over the chip having to do it for me. It means that if there's ever a m…
Sure if you write very low level stuff, C is probably more suitable. I wonder how much today's "embedded devices" still have in common with traditional embedded devices, though? If it is capable of running JavaScript, it probably is a lot more powerful than some microprocessor with just 2KB RAM where you have to squeeze every bit out of your code. On the PI you can run a complete Linux installation. I don't think the…
Yes, statically typed languages just put a bunch of metadata in the code, but I think it's useful to have the guarantees provided by a static type system when your controlling things.
Like if you're controlling a robot arm. I'd rather have the type system make sure I don't try to do something stupid, like add a string to an int that's controlling the degree of the arm. Static languages make sure you can't do that, most dynamic language will let you do that.
Forgive me for not being hip but why try so hard to put JS in new places? It seems to be just an unfortunate historical accident that JS is one of the most popular languages in the world - does anyone actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages? Could we invest in CoffeeScript instead, at the very least?
Whatever language it is I'm glad prototyping devices are coming out at a cost that basically makes them an impulse purchase.
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Why it's always C/C++ (not even Pascal or Oberon) in another corner of the ring? If hardware is powerful enough to sustain Node.JS, why not use OCaml, Racket or, maybe, some JVM-based language? Or, if the scripting is a requirement, Lua, Tcl or maybe Python.
Because a lot of people know Javascript and C/C++.
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Because everyone* knows JavaScript. I'd wager that the vast majority of professional software engineers work on the web, or very close to the web, and JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. I mean just look at the front page of Hacker News on any given week. It's full of talk of JavaScript and new JavaScript libraries and new things to do in JavaScript. When you think about how many more people this can reach wi…
Very nice analogy (the lingua franca ). The state of CS and the convergence we're seeing toward the web worries me though.
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I would have thought this was obvious, but orders of magnitude more developers know Javascript than Lua[1], thanks largely to the popularity of browsers as a programming environment. According to some recent research[2], the three primary factors affecting the adoption of a programming language by developers are, in this order: 1. Libraries available 2. Familiarity 3. Performance And per the paper, this order of pref…
I think JavaScript might be most successful on Arduino for the same reason - it's a platform with which most tinkerers are familiar. http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2013/07/16/javascript-powe...
It would be interesting to see scheme implemented in hardware, complete with primitives intended to be wired to low-level pointer manipulation functions. Further, it would be interesting to see someone seasoned in low-level C sit down with a copy of Lion's Unix Commentary and the NetBSD sources and attempt to implement a minimal Unix atop the scheme hardware using only said hardware's scheme dialect ("SysScheme"?).
It would be interesting to see scheme implemented in hardware, complete with primitives intended to be wired to low-level pointer manipulation functions. Further, it would be interesting to see someone seasoned in low-level C sit down with a copy of Lion's Unix Commentary and the NetBSD sources and attempt to implement a minimal Unix atop the scheme hardware using only said hardware's scheme dialect ("SysScheme"?).
So, lisp machines of the 80s?