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The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

destroyallsoftware.com

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Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#121
post #119
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses Flutter/Dart for their own apps fairly frequently. Obviously not the right choice for the most complex apps. Android system programming and cross platform apps are use cases that are divergent enough that trying to smash them together would result in nobody being happy about the outcome.

Pretty sure AdWords is built on dart too

Of course, they were the ones that saved Dart in first place, after DartiumVM was killed.

Having just finished moving from GWT into AngularDart.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#122

Surprised no one mentioned this is the guy who brought us this masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and watch it, best 5 minutes of your day guaranteed. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

There are a few mistakes in this talk; I'll list just two that I noticed.

1. He calls Array(16) and then talks about there being 16 separators. Of course, there are only 15. This kinda breaks the Batman joke.

2. He writes {}+[] and claims that he's adding a list to an object, then mocks the fact that it gives a different result than []+{} which gives [object Object]. In reality, if you write ({}+[]), you also get [object Object]. I'll leave it as a puzzle for you to figure out why {}+[] is different. (Hint: Gurer vf ab bowrpg gurer.)

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo. Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.

Where does it consume more than Electron?

[deleted]

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#124
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo. Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.

You got sources to back this up, or is this just you're opinion?

[deleted]

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#125

We’re past the halfway point of Bernhardt’s 2035 timeline; JavaScript hasn’t died yet, but it’s clearly writing its own eulogy in WebAssembly.

Multiple generations of your family will be long dead before last JS instruction gets executed. Unless there's going to happen a global thermonuclear war. I still bet on JS surviving over most humans.

[deleted]

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#126
post #11

JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. Peop…

> but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once Is really that simple compared to a normal cross platform web application written in (for example, but there are multiple frameworks) QT? I mean, sure you have to write JavaScript and not C++, but in the end is that more simple? Maybe to start with yes, but then you get into tooling, typescript, multiple build steps, etc that makes it prob…

You're not wrong, but users' UI/UX experience is already aligned with web apps. QT is weak on the web side, and with C++, there are too many things to worry about.

Precisely because I don't write it directly, I think what I need is not C++ but JavaScript. Thread safety and verification responsibilities in C++ are, in my opinion, the biggest bottlenecks in the age of AI development.

I'm tolerant of the brief pauses caused by JavaScript's garbage collector, but users are not tolerant of crashes. That's the key.

And while the core engine should be in Rust or C++, the code presented to the user? Yes, I think Electron is the right choice. The reason is that it's a familiar UI. If you present an unfamiliar new UI, users have to relearn it. But web UI is already familiar to most generations. From this perspective, I think Electron is far better than C++ in terms of design. I don't believe performance always wins.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#127
post #37

I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.

The presentation is a work of speculative fiction presented in a deadpan manner. The things demonstrated in the presentation (Unix shell with C compiler targeting asm.js running inside a web browser) did not actually exist at the time.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax? I got 99 problems with js, but syntax ain't one of them. It's just C-style syntax, no?

C syntax was never that great. It's basically mnemonic PDP-11 assembler with a few added data structures. js is mutant C with dementia - hacked together over over a fortnight, full of inconsistencies and weird corners. console.log(1 + "2"); // "12" console.log(1 - "2"); // -1 console.log(NaN === NaN); // false console.log(+0 === -0); // true const obj = {}; console.log(obj.foo); // undefined, not an error

C syntax dropped the ball badly on operator precedence. Left Shift >, and Bitwise And & should have been at the same priority as multiplication or division, while Bitwise Or (|) should have been at the same priority as addition.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#129
post #120
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses Flutter/Dart for their own apps fairly frequently. Obviously not the right choice for the most complex apps. Android system programming and cross platform apps are use cases that are divergent enough that trying to smash them together would result in nobody being happy about the outcome.

Except for AdWords and Google Pay, which ones? As far as I am aware, most teams would rather use J2Objc or KMM than Flutter.

Everything running on Fuchsia; NotebookLM; various dashboards and admin apps like Google Classroom, Google Analytics; Google Earth; Google Pay, etc.

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

#130
post #122

Surprised no one mentioned this is the guy who brought us this masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and watch it, best 5 minutes of your day guaranteed. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

There are a few mistakes in this talk; I'll list just two that I noticed. 1. He calls Array(16) and then talks about there being 16 separators. Of course, there are only 15. This kinda breaks the Batman joke. 2. He writes {}+[] and claims that he's adding a list to an object, then mocks the fact that it gives a different result than []+{} which gives [object Object]. In reality, if you write ({}+[]), you also get [ob…

Good catch. I'm sure there could be more technical inaccuracies in the talk, but again, this is for entertainment purposes I assume, not education.
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