201–210 of 320 posts
I'm the maintainer of nitrogen (http://github.com/nitrogenjs/service), which is a node.js based project to provide web services and client libraries for devices like this. Check it out if you are interested in devices like this!
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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...
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Why? I really would like to understand, because I see JS as a necessary evil, and would rather use something else if given the option.
As someone who has come around to Javascript after many years avoiding it, I think I can answer you: people like Javascript for a similar reason to why people like Python. As long as you stick to a strict set of conventions, Javascript is a very compact and manageable language, with a bit of extra flexibility to spice things up due to its prototypal nature. With Python, you don't have to worry about the conventions p…
I'll take "most terrifying things you could tell an electrical engineer in 2005" for $2000, Alex.
Now this has more or less been discussed to death in the threads above and below, but while I don't necessarily think running JS on a uC is a great idea, I don't see a problem with letting non-hardware-versed folk write low level code. People who know hardware will probably not use it for anything critical, and if it makes someone's life easier without endangering others or utterly diluting the community (knock on wood...) then so be it. There's no reason to be elitist about low level programming.
At this moment my workspace consists of a bit of code for an 8bit microcontroller, a FPGA layout + VHDL, and a mixed signal high speed PCB layout I've been laboring over for the better part of two weeks. Take that, "low level" C! Now I could go off about how superior and/or necessary my low level methods are, but my friend who's working on an ASIC design might say something similar to me. There's always a lower level. As always it's a little bit about preference, and a lot about using the appropriate tool for the job.
I might have a problem if web developers started cramming JS onto arduinos and calling themselves competent hardware engineers, but (and I think most people in the field would agree with me) I suspect the likelihood of that happening is negligible. It becomes apparent very, very quickly when someone is pretending to know how to hardware.
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?
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?
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Many people do enjoy writing JavaScript and view it as just as good as Python and others.
I've dealt with these kind of programmers on numerous occasions. While they may claim to know other programming languages, they usually don't know much about them at all, in reality. If they do know another language, it's PHP, which is just about as bad as JavaScript in most respects. Any programmer who has real experience with a variety of different programming languages will become very aware of how inferior JavaSc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Language popularity is a pretty fickle thing. It was not too long ago that you'd be laughed out of the room if you suggested using Javascript for any kind of serious work. Perl, once the king of scripting languages by orders of magnitude, is now viewed as being something close to COBOL: a few old guys know it, but none of the cool kids will touch it.