Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JavaScript right on the hardware

technical.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 320 posts

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#141

Post by icebraining »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #128
seldo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought this was obvious, but orders of magnitude more developers know Javascript than Lua[1], thanks largely to the popularity of browsers as a programming environment. According to some recent research[2], the three primary factors affecting the adoption of a programming language by developers are, in this order: 1. Libraries available 2. Familiarity 3. Performance And per the paper, this order of pref…

> the three primary factors affecting the adoption of a programming language by developers are, in this order: > 1. Libraries available Not just programming languages. Microcontrollers too. You could get much better performance out of a bare AVR, but where are the libraries and modules? Whereas an Arduino comes with a library for anything that moves - of course most people are going to prefer it.

What makes the Arduino non-"bare"? The Arduino language is just C++, which gets compiled using gcc and uploaded using avrdude. It's not exactly running on a VM or using an interpreted language.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#142

Post by Florin_Andrei »

johnpmayer wrote: post #31
twog wrote: post #16

So much negativity in this thread & on HN in general. Not everyone has hardware experience, and this looks great for newcomers.

Moreover, not everybody working with hardware needs to or should be dealing with low-level details.

Moreover, not everybody working with software actually understands microcontrollers.

I just replied to someone who was saying "what's the point, a BeagleBone Black is so much more powerful".

(sigh)

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#143

Post by malandrew »

So a lot of people have been complaining: "Why not language X, Y or Z instead of JavaScript?"

This to me makes me think that there is a space out there for a board that has some equivalent to vagrant/docker but for microcontrollers, where you can just flash the device with a image supporting a language of your choice.

Near as I can tell, there is nothing I read on the product launch page that says that JavaScript is supported at the physical hardware level.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#144

Post by anonymoushn »

drdaeman wrote: post #85
SimHacker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LuaJIT would like to have a word with JVM. Plus, Lua isn't controlled by a creepy asshole who thinks the NSA is essential and says stupid shit like "Who's ever heard of government misusing information?"

I'm curious. I persume, with quite powerful hardware, task's not going to be trivial and may require some concurrently running processes. JVM has threads. Akka adds actors (those seem quite nice when used with Scala). Does Lua/LuaJIT offer something simple-looking-yet-powerful in that area?

This comment is a bit incoherent, so I'm not sure if I'm responding correctly at all. Your C/C++ program can contain any number of Lua states, and can also contain an infrastructure for passing messages between these states. The states themselves are single-threaded. Within a single Lua state, you can have any number of coroutines, but these do not work like JVM threads or goroutines; they must be scheduled explicitly.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#145

Post by lifeformed »

marssaxman wrote: post #124
Widdershin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know when people talk about negativity in Hacker News comments? This is what they mean.

Not sure what you mean by that. I meant exactly what I said: I feel sorry for anyone whose linguistic toolbox is so limited that Javascript is their best option for writing low-level code for manipulating electronic devices. It is hard to imagine a more profound mismatch between the tool and the problem it is supposed to solve.

I just want to program a little thingy to do fun stuff, and this is it. I don't care about languages, I already know js.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#146

Post by Widdershin »

marssaxman wrote: post #124
Widdershin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know when people talk about negativity in Hacker News comments? This is what they mean.

Not sure what you mean by that. I meant exactly what I said: I feel sorry for anyone whose linguistic toolbox is so limited that Javascript is their best option for writing low-level code for manipulating electronic devices. It is hard to imagine a more profound mismatch between the tool and the problem it is supposed to solve.

I suppose that's a fair comment. That said, I highly doubt there are many people who would need this, but definitely some that would want it.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#147

Post by nawitus »

phpnode wrote: post #5
nawitus wrote: post #4

From the title I expected the CPU to actually run JavaScript, like a certain decades old computer (of which name I can't recall).

you probably mean a Lisp Machine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

Found what I meant: B5000 directly supported higher level languages.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#148

Post by Florin_Andrei »

icebraining wrote: post #141
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the three primary factors affecting the adoption of a programming language by developers are, in this order: > 1. Libraries available Not just programming languages. Microcontrollers too. You could get much better performance out of a bare AVR, but where are the libraries and modules? Whereas an Arduino comes with a library for anything that moves - of course most people are going to prefer it.

What makes the Arduino non-"bare"? The Arduino language is just C++, which gets compiled using gcc and uploaded using avrdude. It's not exactly running on a VM or using an interpreted language.

Sure, but with Arduino you're still floating on top of the Wiring libraries for almost anything you do. Coding a bare-metal AVR is a bit different:

http://florin.myip.org/blog/how-make-halloween-creepy-blinki...

There's no significant difference, unless you want fully predictable real-time behavior (of which my piece of code is NOT an example, but that's all I have online).

Most people shouldn't care.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#149

Post by tn13 »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #12
tn13 wrote: post #8

This is precisely what I wanted to work with.

Why? Because it uses JavaScript? I'd rather stick with my Arduino and use C. I don't get the whole "JavaScript Everywhere" meme, I'd rather use almost any other modern language (note the almost).

I perfectly understand your sentiment. When it comes to embedded systems nothing would beat C in near future especially those systems where safety matters.

The lab I am working with explores different ways to code robotic and embedded systems. From MIT's SCRATCH to Erlang we have used them all. One of the area that we have been exploring is of using functional programming languages to program embedded systems. (For example we coded a robosoccer using Erlang).

Being a Javascript enthusiast I always wanted to be able to write small JS programs that I could use to control hardware. Given that JS has good support for Functional programming languages as well, I wanted to try that as well.

There is no doubt that people are expecting too much from Javascript but I do believe this is a very novel attempt that I see a point in supporting. I do not think JS is a language that will find application in say automotive systems but it can certainly be used to program robosoccer in my lab.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#150

Post by tn13 »

Tichy wrote: post #24
dkuntz2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because it uses JavaScript? I'd rather stick with my Arduino and use C. I don't get the whole "JavaScript Everywhere" meme, I'd rather use almost any other modern language (note the almost).

You prefer C over JavaScript? Header files? Pointer arithmetic hell? Precompiler Macros? Manual Memory Management? Seriously? To each their own, though.

C rules the embedded systems world. By embedded system I refer to the serious applications such as automotive systems and so on and not some funky new toy project done using Arduino.

There are some very good reasons why C can not be replaced by any other programming language when it comes to safety critical embedded systems. That is what separates men from boys.

Post reply on HN