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JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

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Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#31

Post by noir_lord »

blhack wrote: post #9

This is absolutely a NIGHTMARE for new developers. People come into the language, and there are what seems like an infinite number of "the only right" ways to do something, all of vary degrees of complexity/usefulness, and all claiming that they are god's gift to computer science. That last part is the part that is most frustrating to me, and it isn't unique to javascript. Google, facebook, yahoo, etc. have all gotte…

I just use Knockout.js unless there is a really compelling reason not to, I just chose one and learnt it decently well.

It supports IE (back to 6 believe it or not), is backwards compatible with itself, is relatively mature, very stable, performs fine, supports modern stuff like component orientated architectures and custom tags (if you want them), interops brilliant with lo-dash/jquery and grows with you, it's also way more of a library rather than a framework so there is very little koolaid, the devs answer on github and are active (if not a huge community).

I also rather like it's Do The Thing binding syntax (not least because with phpstorm and pycharm you can create custom language injections on XML attributes meaning I can do jump to definition near perfectly).

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#32

Post by davnicwil »

tim333 wrote: post #10
felixgallo wrote: post #8

One wonders how we get out of this mess. You'd have thought that Microsoft/Google/Apple/whomever would have at least tried to include a better alternative language in their browser by now. What stops them besides inertia?

They've tried Typescript and Dart. No massive uptake to date. WebAssembly may be a way forward.

Typescript transpiles to Javascript - its purpose is to allow static type-checking of regular Javascript code by dev tools, prior to transpilation.

AFAIK It has no features which would benefit from being used at runtime and there's never been any intention to run it straight in the browser. (If I'm wrong please correct me)

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#33

Post by svisser »

chuckcode wrote: post #29
Xeoncross wrote: post #13

I learned a while ago that it doesn't matter how broken something is if everyone is using it. Humans are incredibly resourceful, if not also short-sighted. Look at PHP, look at Javascript, look at Wordpress, look at email, look at the original jQuery etc...

qwerty keyboard is my favorite example. Designed to solve the key sticking problem when typing too fast but now we're all stuck with a layout designed to be inefficient. https://www.addedbytes.com/blog/dvorak-vs-qwerty/

By preventing the key sticking problem, it was more efficient than earlier designs - it wasn't designed to be inefficient.

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#34

Post by lkrubner »

felixgallo wrote: post #8

One wonders how we get out of this mess. You'd have thought that Microsoft/Google/Apple/whomever would have at least tried to include a better alternative language in their browser by now. What stops them besides inertia?

X, Flash, Swing, JavaFX, SilverLight, AWT and more were all attempts to offer a GUI over TCP. The important question is why they all failed. This is a complex issue and many good essays have been written that address parts of the question. Still, I think most of it can be boiled down to 3 things:

1.) some were closed-source and proprietary

2.) some were needlessly verbose, or enforced a workflow that made it difficult to interact with designers

3.) some depended on HTTP for at least the initial handshake

What the world needs is an open-source GUI technology that is fun for designers to work with and which uses a protocol other than HTTP.

My own bet would be that when we finally get such a technology, it will come from the world of gaming, where they already do amazing GUIs, and where they often abandon both HTTP and TCP and use UDP instead.

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#35

Post by Someone »

tim333 wrote: post #10
felixgallo wrote: post #8

One wonders how we get out of this mess. You'd have thought that Microsoft/Google/Apple/whomever would have at least tried to include a better alternative language in their browser by now. What stops them besides inertia?

They've tried Typescript and Dart. No massive uptake to date. WebAssembly may be a way forward.

That takes out Microsoft and Google from that list. Also, ‘whomever’ already had its opportunity with Java.

So one could conclude the wait is for Apple with Swift. But would they want that? I think they would rather see people write iOS-specific apps in Swift.

Of course there may be another 'whomever'. Facebook with Hack, perhaps? Their advantage may be that they aren’t big in hardware or operating systems, but I still think they are too big and therefore deemed too dangerous by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

I think the only way is for some small player to come out of nowhere and somehow take the world by storm, probably, as you say, by riding on top of WebAssembly.

(by the way, I don’t think WebAssembly will be the leveller that allows everybody to pick his own language to develop in for the web. I think we will see some high-level API in WebAssembly develop that fits one language better than others. Of course, we could again choose to make “C” that language and that way allow almost any language interface with any other language through a crude interface, but I would hope we can do better by now)

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#37

Post by jacquesm »

lkrubner wrote: post #34
felixgallo wrote: post #8

One wonders how we get out of this mess. You'd have thought that Microsoft/Google/Apple/whomever would have at least tried to include a better alternative language in their browser by now. What stops them besides inertia?

X, Flash, Swing, JavaFX, SilverLight, AWT and more were all attempts to offer a GUI over TCP. The important question is why they all failed. This is a complex issue and many good essays have been written that address parts of the question. Still, I think most of it can be boiled down to 3 things: 1.) some were closed-source and proprietary 2.) some were needlessly verbose, or enforced a workflow that made it difficul…

Did X fail?

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#38

Post by mightybyte »

felixgallo wrote: post #8

One wonders how we get out of this mess. You'd have thought that Microsoft/Google/Apple/whomever would have at least tried to include a better alternative language in their browser by now. What stops them besides inertia?

I want browsers to support a bytecode language designed from the ground up specifically for this purpose instead of just being a quick hack that by a fluke of history happened to get wide adoption. It would be more like .NET and the JVM in the sense that it would be designed for a specific purpose (a language suitable as a target language for compilers from a wide variety of high level languages). But we should not confuse that last sentence to mean that it should be similar to .NET or the JVM. I think two main design goals should be efficiency and good support for high level languages. This means proper support for tail call optimization so that functional languages like Haskell, Clojure, etc can generate efficient code. It might also mean some special considerations for garbage collection that I'm not knowledgable enough to comment on...amongst other things. WebAssembly sounds like the right idea but if they miss important things like TCO, then it's still not acceptable.

Re: JavaScript developers are incredible at problem solving, unfortunately

#39

Post by Nadya »

mattchamb wrote: post #27
Nadya wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how to interpret the last part... "Where I am from, the point of digging is not freedom from digging." Is it a statement that the point of digging is to reach further and learn more (positive)? Is it a statement more along the lines of "We dig because we must dig to survive." (negative)? Or possibly that digging is simply a way of life (negative)?

I take it to mean that if you keep digging, the hole will just be deeper. I.e. you cant dig yourself out of a hole.

What are you doing when you "dig into a problem"? :) I have a feeling the intent was supposed to be pessimistic/negative (as you stated). I decided to have some fun with the words. It leaves a few possibilities as to the meaning and speaks well of what the developers are typically doing in their "problem solving": digging deeper (for knowledge) rather than trying to get out of a hole.

"People who cannot dig themselves out of a hole have never tried digging sideways." - JS Developer

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