201–210 of 236 posts
Gary Bernhardt (rightly) says that JavaScript is shit (with some other insights).
HN comments tl;dr:
50%: "Waahhh, JavaScript is awesome and Node.js is wonderful, shut up Gary Bernhardt."
25%: Smug twats talking about how they're too busy changing the world with JavaScript to even bother to comment.
25%: Pedants and know-it-alls having sub-debates within sub-debates.
Pretty standard turnout. See you tomorrow.
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Are you seriously equating the laws of physics and human artefacts? That would be ludicrous. While the laws of physics are set in stone, human artefacts can be remade. That changes everything I'm sure you have the skills required to, say, write a preprocessor for whatever language you are using, and add some special constructs in it. Missing feature? Done in a few days. So… If the laws of physics suck, suck it up. If…
> Are you seriously equating the laws of physics and human artefacts? Yes I am. The property that they share is they will not be changed or avoided in the near future. Another property is that despite certain limitations, you can still accomplish many things. If you focus on these limitations, you will accomplish less. > If the laws of physics suck, suck it up. Not in all cases. Physics is just a model of our underst…
You vastly overestimate the effort it takes to change your tools. When I was talking of a few days to add a feature to a language, that was a conservative estimate. With proper knowledge it's more like hours. And I'm not even assuming access to the implementation of the language. Source-to-source transformations are generally more than enough.
Heck, I have done it to Haskell and Lua. And it wasn't a simple language feature, it was Parsing Expression Grammars (the full business). I used no special tools. I just bootstrapped from MetaII (I wrote the first version by hand, then wrote about 30 compilers to the nearly final version). (For Haskell, I took a more direct route by using the Parsec library.)
Granted, writing a full compiler to asm.js is a fairly large undertaking. But fixing bits and pieces of the language is easy. Real easy.
> Not in all cases. Physics is just a model of our understanding of physical existence.
Oh, come on, don't play dumb. You know I was talking about the way the universe really works, not the way we think it works.
> I choose to focus on that and progress in mastery of my craft. If you want to complain and/or change your tools, go ahead. I don't judge you.
I'm not sure what you're saying. It sounds like you want to focus on particular programming languages. This would be a mistake, pure and simple. You want to master the underlying principles of programming languages. It can let you pick up the next big thing in a few days. It can let you perceive design flaws (such as dynamic scoping). It can let you manipulate your tools, instead of just using them.
Your way leads to obsolescence.
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My advice to you: if you haven't already, go learn a language from a paradigm you don't know. I suggest Haskell. Also write an interpreter for a toy language. Trust me, that's time well spent. For instance, knowing Ocaml made me a better C++ programmer.
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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 f…
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Used to to do a good amount of flash development - you could actually do it with just a text editor and a compiler (which was free). There were also quite nice free IDEs, like FlashDevelop.
We're talking late 90s/early 2000s here. If anything like that existed during Flash's heyday, I certainly wasn't aware of it.
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> Are you seriously equating the laws of physics and human artefacts? Yes I am. The property that they share is they will not be changed or avoided in the near future. Another property is that despite certain limitations, you can still accomplish many things. If you focus on these limitations, you will accomplish less. > If the laws of physics suck, suck it up. Not in all cases. Physics is just a model of our underst…
> Yes I am. The property that they share is they will not be changed or avoided in the near future. You vastly overestimate the effort it takes to change your tools. When I was talking of a few days to add a feature to a language, that was a conservative estimate. With proper knowledge it's more like hours . And I'm not even assuming access to the implementation of the language. Source-to-source transformations are g…
> You vastly overestimate the effort it takes to change your tools.
Cool! If you don't mind the asset overhead, having to recreate the existing javascript ecosystem, & the abstraction mapping, & the other unknown unknowns, then it's all good. Are there any well-known production sites that use such techniques? I don't doubt there will be, but are such techniques "ready for prime time"?
I personally have not experienced enough pain to be motivated to all that.
> Oh, come on, don't play dumb. You know I was talking about the way the universe really works, not the way we think it works.
The thing about existence is we don't know about it in it's entirety. Even if we know the rules, there are many mysteries to explore. It's wonderful :-)
> It sounds like you want to focus on particular programming languages. This would be a mistake, pure and simple. You want to master the underlying principles of programming languages.
I am mastering the underlying principles of programming languages.
I want to focus on getting better, faster, & smarter. For the web, it's nice to have everything in one language. Lot's of sharing of logic. Keeping DRY. Being efficient with time. Smaller team sizes. More stuff getting done.
Maybe compiling to javascript will help for other languages.
I'm a fan of dynamic languages. There's more than one way to master the craft. Asserting your one true way is a failure of imagination.
> Your way leads to obsolescence.
I doubt it. You vastly underestimate my ability to adapt & evolve ;-)
> My advice to you: if you haven't already, go learn a language from a paradigm you don't know. I suggest Haskell.
Maybe one day. In the mean time, I'm focusing on becoming a more fully rounded thinker. That means subjects outside of programming. Learning yet another language has diminishing returns.
I'm humble enough to not give you unsolicited advice, which would only serve my ego.
Ooh, and I agree. OCaml, Erlang, & Lisp are fun languages. Javascript is also fun.
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The following perfectly describes my sentiments about all the complaints people have about JavaScript, PHP, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
In that video, Louis is talking about himself in the third person: he's the one complaining on the plane. It's not about some group of "others" who are "bad" and don't appreciate the world; it's about our nature as humans.
Hmm, "the guy next to me goes 'pfft, this is bullsh*t'".
> it's about our nature as humans
Well, it's about our current generation of Americans (maybe Westerners). This complaining seems like unnecessary stress to me. I understand, because I used to do it.
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It's not exactly checking for falsy values. Although all falsy values will lead to a radix of 10 being applied. parseInt internally uses the ToInt32 abstract operation on the radix parameter. Once it has that value, it explicitly looks to see if the value is 0. If it is, it uses a radix of 10. https://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-pa... Edit: I hope that doesn't come off as pedantic. My point wasn…
This is HN, there's no such thing as being pedantic. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not exactly checking for falsy values. Although all falsy values will lead to a radix of 10 being applied. parseInt internally uses the ToInt32 abstract operation on the radix parameter. Once it has that value, it explicitly looks to see if the value is 0. If it is, it uses a radix of 10. https://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-pa... Edit: I hope that doesn't come off as pedantic. My point wasn…
This is HN, there's no such thing as being pedantic. :)
Where did you get the footage of Epic Citadel used in the talk? http://unrealengine.com/html5 seems to have been purged from the internet (possibly due to this year's UE4 announcements?) and I can't find any mirrors anywhere. Which is a shame, because that demo was how I used to prove to people that asm.js and the like were a Real Thing.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.unrealengine.com/h...
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We're talking late 90s/early 2000s here. If anything like that existed during Flash's heyday, I certainly wasn't aware of it.
If I had to pinpoint it, I'd say Flash's primetime was around 2005-2008 perhaps, and FlashDevelop was available then. Guess we probably define it's prime differently haha, I'm thinking more of when it matured - AS3 as a language, lots of tooling choices, etc.
I was thinking about the days of Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Newgrounds, and so on, when flash cartoons and games were (for kids, at least) a huge part of internet culture, and everyone wanted to be a Flash animator. Youtube kinda killed the Flash cartoon medium, sadly. Sure, videos are simpler and don't rely on a proprietary binary blob, but there's nothing like loading up a Strong Bad email and clicking random things (or, uh, holding down tab) trying to find secrets.