Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

destroyallsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 236 posts

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#161

Post by calibwam »

gary_bernhardt wrote: post #93
vor_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second JavaScript example, when he told someone in the audience, "No, that's just an object." It was a string.

I knew that it was a string. If you listen closely, you'll hear that he asked "is that an array of object?" He probably asked that because it's in square brackets. I said "No, it's just an object". I've probably seen twenty people call this "wrong", which frustrates me. It's not wrong. It was a stringified object! I didn't say "stringified" because it wasn't relevant to the question of whether the object was in an ar…

It is wrong because it is the toString of Object, because the + operator wants to do string concatenation. You were misleading the audience, both by using a shell which doesn't show strings with quotes, and saying that the toString of the object is 'just an object'.

And that is not the only thing that is misleading, as you clealy said that {} was an object. Yes, the syntax in js is weird as it looks like an object, but it isn't. Again, a better shell would not let you do this.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#163

Post by peedy »

madeofpalk wrote: post #126
lelandbatey wrote: post #65

First, I very much love the material of the talk, and the idea of Metal. It's fascinating, really makes me think about the future. However, I also want to rave a bit about his presentation in general! That was very nicely delivered, for many reasons. His commitment to the story, of programming from the perspective in 2035, was excellent and in many cases subtle. His deadpan delivery really added to the humor; the fac…

Also, Java-YavaScript

Many people from Europe do that. It does sound cooler.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#164

Post by EdSharkey »

cbhl wrote: post #55
steveklabnik wrote: post #36

Consider the relationship between Chromebooks and METAL. (I'm typing this from my Pixel...)

Bernhardt later tweeted: "I gave The Birth & Death of JavaScript seven times and no one ever asked why METAL wasn't written in Rust." https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/456875300580651009

It was assumed because that was/will be a foregone conclusion.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#165

Post by nilliams »

calibwam wrote: post #161
gary_bernhardt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew that it was a string. If you listen closely, you'll hear that he asked "is that an array of object?" He probably asked that because it's in square brackets. I said "No, it's just an object". I've probably seen twenty people call this "wrong", which frustrates me. It's not wrong. It was a stringified object! I didn't say "stringified" because it wasn't relevant to the question of whether the object was in an ar…

It is wrong because it is the toString of Object, because the + operator wants to do string concatenation. You were misleading the audience, both by using a shell which doesn't show strings with quotes, and saying that the toString of the object is 'just an object'. And that is not the only thing that is misleading, as you clealy said that {} was an object. Yes, the syntax in js is weird as it looks like an object, b…

As gary explained he wasn't wrong in his response to the question because the audience member was asking whether [object Object] means the object is in an array. It doesn't. The string point is moot.

I do agree the {} + [] example has always felt a bit unfair to me (for the reason that {} is a block), but whatever, it's a light-hearted talk.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#166

Post by gurkendoktor »

jarek-foksa wrote: post #135
mianos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hard 'J's in many languages (Like Slavic languages). It's pronounced 'y'. Anyone have a list?

The sound ʤ seems to occur in most Slavic languages [1], I guess the primary reason why "Java" is read as "Yava" is because people tend to apply local pronunciation rules to commonly used foreign words, either because of lack of knowledge of native pronunciation or because native pronunciation sounds just silly. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricat...

YavaScript is a very common pronunciation in Germany, the dj sound only appears in "loannames" like Jennifer. My grandfather always told me to find a nice yob :)

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#167

Post by drostie »

1stop wrote: post #112
liviu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich covered this subject at O'Reilly Fluent conference in 2012: http://youtu.be/Rj49rmc01Hs?t=5m7s

Seems he took the Wat talk a little personally, but I'm not sure why he defends {} + [] by saying the first { is a statement... wat?

It's because they wanted to say both:

    if (a) b;
and

   if (a) { b; c; }
which tends to make you think of curly braces as a syntactic feature which can appear anywhere, turning many lines of code into one line of code. If you think that way then these should possibly also be valid:

    {b; c}
    {b}
    {}
but, since JS scope is function-oriented and in other places (e.g. functions) the braces are ultimately needed anyways, even for one-liners, it seems like this was a stupid choice and we should have just rejected the form:

    if (a) b;
and then the reuse of {} for lightweight (if non-robust) hashmaps would perhaps be unambiguous again.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#168

Post by jerf »

nothiggs wrote: post #160
lomnakkus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should just give up completely on trying to make better things? I don't think that was the point of the video (some amount of gratitude for the things we have) -- but then maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

On the contrary. We should strive to correct all the "wats" that obviously exist in all these languages, but most of what I see is just complaints, most of them ignoring the amazing things that can be done with these technologies. Over 30 year I've been programming in more languages than I care to count, and I don't remember at any point having a specific language stop me from achieving my goal because it has some tr…

"I don't remember at any point having a specific language stop me from achieving my goal because it has some traps or design flaws."

I have to admit, a language has never stopped me personally. But it most assuredly has hurt me when trying to program with other people, who do not have a direct psychic hotline into my brain that tells them what preconditions must hold before my code will work properly, and what things they can and can not do with a certain library, and most importantly, why they can and can not do those things. Languages that allow me to encode more of those things into the program itself, instead of the ambient documentation-that-nobody-ever-reads-even-when-I've-put-tons-of-work-into-it, work better.

And as my memory isn't all that great, it turns out that if I'm away from my own code for long enough, I become one of those people who don't have a direct hotline to my-brain-in-the-past.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#169

Post by robocaptain »

madeofpalk wrote: post #126
lelandbatey wrote: post #65

First, I very much love the material of the talk, and the idea of Metal. It's fascinating, really makes me think about the future. However, I also want to rave a bit about his presentation in general! That was very nicely delivered, for many reasons. His commitment to the story, of programming from the perspective in 2035, was excellent and in many cases subtle. His deadpan delivery really added to the humor; the fac…

Also, Java-YavaScript

It sounds so natural that I immediately started thinking I had actually been saying it wrong all these years.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#170

Post by jerf »

gary_bernhardt wrote: post #88
nteon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On linux, system calls don't result in a TLB flush - kernel data structures and code are in a different portion of the virtual address space (starting from the top of VM memory, if I remember right) that is tagged as not being available from ring 3. So system calls are quite fast. EDIT: Kernel memory begins at PAGE_OFFSET, see here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand... Kernel memory lacks t…

I didn't know that! It certainly makes sense. Context switches still thrash the TLB, though. The performance cost of that has gotten better as time has gone on, but I wonder how many transistors (and how much power) CPUs are burning for that mitigation. The "how computers actually work" digression originally had a section on context switches, but I removed it early on because I felt like that section was dragging. To…

You know about http://erlangonxen.org/ ? Also something like http://corp.galois.com/halvm . That's probably still not quite low enough level to turn off the MMU, but it's getting there.
Post reply on HN