JavaScript at 20 • Hacker News Board

Re: JavaScript at 20

#281

Post by BrendanEich » Sat, May 16, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

teacup50 wrote: post #17

"Always bet on JS" is complete nonsense: http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 It does those things poorly , and at great expense. Eich did one thing, in 10 days, that was market positioned such that it became ubiquitous, and he's been banging that drum ever since -- to everyone's detriment, given how much power over technical direction he wielded at Mozilla, and how much impact Mozilla had on the web pr…

Yawn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673

Oh no, I've been caught, called out on my Throne of Skulls on my Skull Island again! Yes, I had so much power over all the people working on Mozilla, I clouded all their minds with my superpowers.

And post-Chrome, I still do, since apparently in spite of Chrome, your hero, villainous-me managed to kill Dart as a 2nd VM-based language in browsers -- even in Chrome. Mwahahahah!

Re: JavaScript at 20

#282

Post by qdot76367 » Sat, May 16, 2015, 4:06 AM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #281

teacup50 wrote: post #17

"Always bet on JS" is complete nonsense: http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 It does those things poorly , and at great expense. Eich did one thing, in 10 days, that was market positioned such that it became ubiquitous, and he's been banging that drum ever since -- to everyone's detriment, given how much power over technical direction he wielded at Mozilla, and how much impact Mozilla had on the web pr…

Yawn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673 Oh no, I've been caught, called out on my Throne of Skulls on my Skull Island again! Yes, I had so much power over all the people working on Mozilla, I clouded all their minds with my superpowers. And post-Chrome, I still do, since apparently in spite of Chrome, your hero, villainous-me managed to kill Dart as a 2nd VM-based language in browsers -- even in Chrome. Mw…

While this story keeps getting posted again and again, I'd like to step in and provide some first hand experience here instead of just claims, hearsay, or obviously biased opinion.

I had the... experience of working next to Brendan Eich for a while. His Throne of Skulls is no joke and I have no idea how it got past either HR or the ergonomics coach. I kept cutting myself on the damn thing when I'd bump against it, had to keep a first aid kit at my desk. We didn't even know where the skulls came from either, but more kept appearing mysteriously each day.

The laugh was annoying too. I'd be sitting there trying to work on the monolith of doom (which was actually the name for multiple technologies, but no one could decide which was doomier so we just called them all that) and all of the sudden, it's evil laughter time. Nothing breaks concentrating on code like a roar of pure malevolent guffawing. I'm sure many engineers at startups can sympathize.

Much like the rest of this comment thread, I have no idea how this much of the web happened around this man.

-- Web Henchman #1982587

Re: JavaScript at 20

#283

Post by leoc » Sat, May 16, 2015, 4:34 AM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #279

leoc wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that others may judge for themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3092921

You didn't link to any of my comments, so let me help your reading comprehension. My point then was that if Google had had MS's IE4-6-era market share and lack of scruples, they could have pushed Dart into Chrome and started using it in their web properties, and the lack of equivalent performance between DartVM and dart2js -- especially due to lack of bignums and other affordances in JS, which lack Google materially…

> My point was not that JS must be the only way to run Dart simply because I or anyone at Mozilla (or anywhere else, MS and Apple included) prefers JS. That would be dumb, and it's clearly not what I wrote.

I've never suggested that this is what you were saying there. Here I pointed to it as evidence that I was right that "one of Mozilla's reasons for decrying Google's intended browser support for Dart was that Dart compiled to JS would not be competitive with the native Dart implementation", where by "competitive" I was obviously referring to performance. Since we're agreed on that, the claim that everything I wrote above was wrong 'including "the" and "and"' goes out the window. (What I did point out to you at the time is that this was hard to square with the claims being made elsewhere for JS' wonderfulness as a compile target.) Your take on Google's intentions in proposing Dart is also completely in line with my argument that the vendors of major browser engines have huge power basically not constrained by anyone besides the other three vendors, as well as motives that don't always align with the public interest.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#284

Post by anilgulecha » Sat, May 16, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

bla2 wrote: post #167

Every single presentation of Brendan has this "I made this in 10 days" thing, super annoying. JavaScript is a great example how your career can go pretty well if you're good at selling what you're building, even if it's not very good. This isn't meant as a "JavaScript sucks" type of comment, but as a "being good at presenting your work is really important" type of comment. Too many really strong engineers aren't good…

I think he includes it as a joke .. clearly the first few slide states started "in 1993" and done "in 1995". The 10 days seems to be a self-deprecating joke on the popular (incorrect) meme.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#285

Post by girvo » Sat, May 16, 2015, 4:45 AM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #272

lee wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The differences between these languages aren't that big and they're largely aesthetic. They are pretty big. At work I work on a Django-backed project that has a very fat JavaScript front-end client, and JavaScript is incredibly painful to work with compared to Python. It's not merely aesthetics, but JavaScript in the browser is severely lacking in language features that allow it to scale to larger code-bases.

Use ES6 via http://babeljs.io/ already, and be happy :-P.

Definitely! Though, unit-testing becomes interesting, as `rewire`, `proxyquire` and other ways of changing the dependencies inside your modules when they are `import`-ed breaks.

However, it turns out having an AST of your Javascript code is really useful, and lets you do things like this: https://github.com/speedskater/babel-plugin-rewire

Re: JavaScript at 20

#286

Post by sqren » Sat, May 16, 2015, 4:54 AM UTC

teacup50 wrote: post #57

knightofmars wrote: post #40

"Haters gonna hate." Anyone claiming that JS is the "worst thing to happen to the web" and/or that some other language would miraculously solve all of the problems present in JS should do the following, "Go create it." Don't whine about the barriers and how a new language would never be adopted because "JS is already everywhere." There are plenty of people already trying to solve this problem by actively doing someth…

There are no end of alternatives out there today, from mobile platforms to research languages exploring a myriad of aspects of computer science. Just let me know when browser vendors are going to break down the two-tiered system, and let us run the legion of alternatives alongside -- instead of under -- JavaScript. Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.

> Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.

Like Blink-in-JavaScript[0] ? ;)

[0] https://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-in-js

Re: JavaScript at 20

#287

Post by copsarebastards » Sat, May 16, 2015, 5:12 AM UTC

aeze wrote: post #215

copsarebastards wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the people who says JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to the web, and I don't need an alternative to say that, because my issue is with what JavaScript does, not how it does it. An alternative that does the same thing wouldn't solve my complaint. I don't want a web where all my software and data is owned by other people who don't have my best interests in mind. JavaScript allows "free" websites to re…

You're misplacing the blame.

I'm not placing blame at all. I don't think anyone could have foreseen what effect JavaScript would have on the internet.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#288

Post by tosh » Sat, May 16, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

megaman821 wrote: post #275

lee wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The differences between these languages aren't that big and they're largely aesthetic. They are pretty big. At work I work on a Django-backed project that has a very fat JavaScript front-end client, and JavaScript is incredibly painful to work with compared to Python. It's not merely aesthetics, but JavaScript in the browser is severely lacking in language features that allow it to scale to larger code-bases.

I use Django a lot too, but JavaScript (ES6 specifically) just isn't a big mental shift anymore. I prefer Python syntax, but Python, Ruby, and JavaScript are pretty comparable at this point. Also JavaScript has a pretty good variety of languages that compile to it. If you like C#/Scala/Swift use TypeScript. If you like Java use Dart. If you like Lisp ClojureScript.

If you come from Python or Ruby you'll probably have an easier time with Dart than with JavaScript.

Dart comes with a batteries included standard library inspired by Smalltalk (https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ch03.html).

Dart should also feel familiar to people coming from C#. async/await support in Dart was designed by Erik Meijer (who worked on the feature for C#) and iirc he believes it is the Dart implementation is the cleanest implementation yet.

I don't see much similarity between Dart and Java.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#289

Post by tosh » Sat, May 16, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

lee wrote: post #270

wwweston wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Man, python on the server and in the browser. What a world that would be. If you're going to imagine that as a utopian alternative to JS, be sure to be thorough about it and imagine 1995 Python dominating the browser landscape for years and then the advancement path the language has taken on the server playing out among several browsers. Then come back and tell everybody how much prettier it looks than JS (for bonu…

> The differences between these languages aren't that big and they're largely aesthetic. They are pretty big. At work I work on a Django-backed project that has a very fat JavaScript front-end client, and JavaScript is incredibly painful to work with compared to Python. It's not merely aesthetics, but JavaScript in the browser is severely lacking in language features that allow it to scale to larger code-bases.

I also came from a Python (Django, Flask, …) background and had the same issues. Tried CoffeeScript and it helped a little but eventually fell in love with Dart.

Give it a try. I like that it comes with a useful and well designed standard library (like Python).

Re: JavaScript at 20

#290

Post by SilasX » Sat, May 16, 2015, 5:44 AM UTC

knightofmars wrote: post #40

"Haters gonna hate." Anyone claiming that JS is the "worst thing to happen to the web" and/or that some other language would miraculously solve all of the problems present in JS should do the following, "Go create it." Don't whine about the barriers and how a new language would never be adopted because "JS is already everywhere." There are plenty of people already trying to solve this problem by actively doing someth…

"You haven't single-handedly brought about the adoption of a superior client-side language in browsers. Therefore, the double/triple-equals thing was a great idea."