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The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

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Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#223

> xs = ['10', '10', '10'] > xs.map(parseInt) [10, NaN, 2] Javascript is beautiful.

I just wrote this line about two hours ago and my tests weren't thorough enough to catch the bug it introduced. Just when I thought I knew JavaScript. Thanks for saving me some time.

Always remember - it's not a language but a loosely parsable texty thing.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#224
post #9

nice nice,ultimatly languages dont die,unless they are closed source and used for a single purpose ( AS3 ). In 2035,people will still be writing Javascript. I wonder what the language will look like though. Will it get type hinting like PHP? or type coercion? will it enforce strict encapsulation and message passing like Ruby ? will I be able to create adhoc functions just by implementing call/apply on an object? or s…

I think there is a good time that an alpha-version of ES6 will be tentatively rolled out by 2035, 2036 latest.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#225
post #149

A bit OT but what is the problem with omitting function arguments?

Not necessarily anything as such, but it's the sort of thing that can easily lead to bugs if you don't know what you're doing. It's the only way to overload a function with multiple signatures, though, so most libraries and frameworks make heavy use of it.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#226

I like that he mentions "integer". It is still very incredible how JavaScript can work well without a integer construct. Or threads and shared memory. Or bells and whistles.

"JavaScript can work well" - depends on what is understood by 'well'. Some craftsmen are capable of building cars from junk.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wasn't ever anything close to a professional Flash developer, I'll take your word for it if you say that was the best time to be developing for it. 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, sa…

Ah, don't give me too much credit haha, was more of a side-project thing for me, definitely wasn't a professional, especially at the animation side of things (as opposed to the programming side). I was also more involved with the games side of Flash, which Flash became much stronger at as ActionScript 3 came out which coincided with much better Flash performance. Flash advertising and simple animations were probably stronger earlier.

I'm just interested in the topic because it's kind of neat to look back at the internet and observe its history and the changes its gone through. Just did a little wikipediaing for fun - here are when a few different websites / notable games were released:

Newgrounds: 1995

Homestarrunner: 2000

Miniclip: 2001

Armor Games: 2005

Kongregate: 2006

Fancy Pants Adventures: 2006

Desktop Tower Defense: 2007

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> he's the one complaining on the plane. 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.

I read (or watched) Louis say that he was the guy on the plane, but this was a couple of years ago and I'm failing to google it now.

I'm not convinced that this behavior is specific to Americans or Westerners; it may just be that we're most attuned to our own ways of expressing it. I'm also not convinced that it's a general property of the species, though; it would be arrogant for me to claim that kind of fundamental knowledge of how the human mind works. That kind of arrogance is the bread and butter of Hacker News, of course, so this is now necessarily a bad HN comment. ;)

I should've said something more like "it's about the way that we all act towards technology".

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't want to go into this level of detail in the talk, but... I think you still want the MMU enabled, just not used for process isolation. With virtual memory totally disabled, a 1 GB malloc takes 1 GB physical memory even if it's not touched, you can't have swap at all, memory fragmentation kills you dead, etc. It still has a lot of utility outside of isolation. I don't have a good sense of how the performance c…

There's a new CPU architecture in the pipe(should have good silicon within five years, if their projections can be trusted), and it has a very good design around system calls, and also in terms of virtual memory. It has a single 64-bit address space and only protection contexts, and due to the general design of the system it doesn't require any register push(or registers at all, at least in the traditional sense). In…

There's an even bigger revolution in CPU design, with Ivan Sutherland's Fleet - which does away with the clock and sequential execution of instructions - instead, the programming model is based on messaging and traffic control - you direct signals to the units in the chip which perform the computations you want, asynchronously by default - if you need synchronicity, you need to program your own models for it.

While these probably won't be available in the next 5 years, and probably won't be acknowledged by existing programmers for decades - I think these ideas will take over.

http://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/publications https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR9pAaQlVRc

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

#230

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

Since JavaScript and Java have almost nothing in common, I think that's a very reasonable pronunciation. The words look similar, but have very different functional meaning.
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