JavaScript at 20 • Hacker News Board

Re: JavaScript at 20

#191

Post by cmdrfred » Fri, May 15, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #166

swsieber wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't widely know that Javascript is a problem, then merely observing that it's a problem instead of trying to provide a solution would be useful. But it's a widely known problem and so complaining does nothing useful. Essentially, at this point in the game, complaining is useless rehashing of a beaten horse.

There's a whole world of problems to fix before you even get to the problem of Javascript. Right now, the world only has 3.5 base browser engines. Those browser developers have no interest in adding a new standard language like Python, even though more people prefer that to Javascript. So, if you were to develop a new browser language, you need to build a new browser from scratch, and then move a billion people to it…

Man, python on the server and in the browser. What a world that would be.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#192

Post by Dewie3 » Fri, May 15, 2015, 7:58 PM 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 suspect that it might be simple to make something like JS in 10 days when you can effectively delegate the heavy lifting of making it fast etc. (see last slide) to many other people after it has become ubiquitous. :)

Re: JavaScript at 20

#193

Post by nostrademons » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #183

pcwalton wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works on OSes. We have a choice. The kernel doesn't have a DOM. On the Web, the number of GC'd objects that every "process" has to deal with exceeds the number of file descriptors by an order of magnitude. Also, you do have a choice: you can compile your favorite language to JS, even low-level ones via asm.js. > Why do you get to dictate whether we can or can't develop on the web? You leave us with a horrible choic…

Semi-serious question: Other than backwards compatibility, do browsers need to have a DOM? It seems like many web app devs spend more time fighting against the DOM than working with it. Why not just make the browser expose a generic GUI model? Let web devs interact with Webkit or QT directly?

Generic GUI toolkits are very often worse than the DOM. I've worked with Swing, MFC, SWT, Android, and iOS, and all of them are significantly more complicated than the DOM is. They do function at a higher level of abstraction, and the two really nice things they give you are components and a sane layout system (solved by WebComponents and Flexbox, now if only all the major browser vendors would just adopt WebComponents...), but in general I've found that iOS development is about 1.5x-2x slower than web development and native Android development is about 3x slower, roughly on par with Swing or SWT. MFC was a clusterfuck, I wouldn't even go there.

The way frontend devs for other platforms deal with it is to specialize in the nuances of the platform and effectively build your app around the capabilities that Google/Apple/Microsoft/Sun provide. That's fine, and makes for a fairly uniform, polished experience if you have good devs, but it significantly restricts the set of apps you can build. The reason web developers like developing for the web is because it doesn't make you a sharecropper in Google/Apple/Microsoft's world, while building a full-featured GUI framework into the browser would.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#194

Post by copsarebastards » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

JavaScript at 20... apparently doesn't work. I load the page and get a big rectangle that says "JavaScript at 20" and "Brendan Eich" with a link to his Twitter, and nothing I do on the page takes me to the rest of the presentation.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#195

Post by Ygg2 » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:09 PM UTC

cmdrfred wrote: post #191

mozumder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole world of problems to fix before you even get to the problem of Javascript. Right now, the world only has 3.5 base browser engines. Those browser developers have no interest in adding a new standard language like Python, even though more people prefer that to Javascript. So, if you were to develop a new browser language, you need to build a new browser from scratch, and then move a billion people to it…

Man, python on the server and in the browser. What a world that would be.

Filled with version problems :P

Oh, you got Python 6, well we have Python 8 which breaks your code in subtle ways.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#196

Post by jsnk » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:09 PM 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…

1. I think he mentions it because it is an interesting part of JS's birth. There are some ambiguous things about JS that makes people ask, why is this the way it is? Well, one explanation is that, it wasn't a carefully planned language in its conception. Someone needed some language that worked on top of browsers really soon and Eich had to deliver something. So he must have cut corners and made some difficult pragmatic decisions to just make a language that just works on browser. "I made this in 10 days" goes perfectly with this story Eich wants to tell. It's catchy and understandable.

2. O please. Stop with this arrogance. Even if you didn't mean it, it totally comes off as "JS sucks" comment. JS as a language has a huge value in it being a first mover and generating network effect. Would you rather have that we use Java VM on browsers? Or would you rather have 12 different languages used in differently, implemented differently in 12 different browsers? To make matters worse, would you like browsers to change its languages based on what's considered a flavor of the week?

Re: JavaScript at 20

#197

Post by coderzach » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

cmdrfred wrote: post #191

mozumder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole world of problems to fix before you even get to the problem of Javascript. Right now, the world only has 3.5 base browser engines. Those browser developers have no interest in adding a new standard language like Python, even though more people prefer that to Javascript. So, if you were to develop a new browser language, you need to build a new browser from scratch, and then move a billion people to it…

Man, python on the server and in the browser. What a world that would be.

2.7 or 3?

Re: JavaScript at 20

#198

Post by tracker1 » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #101

teacup50 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Internet Explorer had a pretty clean API for adding extra scripting languages.

And in practice, that separation layer lead to objects tied together across COM boundaries, and severe memory leaks for any significant applications.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#199

Post by tracker1 » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:17 PM UTC

iyn wrote: post #137

If you're interested in learning ES6 basics in 20 minutes, this is a great starting point: https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features Check out this repo, if you have a "little more" free time: https://github.com/ericdouglas/ES6-Learning To be honest, I used to dislike JS not so long ago - it was hard to debug, I had to use strange conventions to write OO code etc. But after learning more about the ES6, react/flux, nod…

I've never been a big fan of OO (classes, inheritance chains, and the like)... so for me JS was always a pretty nice fit. With the enhancements for ES6/7 it's rather nice to work with (I'm using babel to transpile though).

Re: JavaScript at 20

#200

Post by copsarebastards » Fri, May 15, 2015, 8:18 PM 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…

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 replace programs running on my machine which is fundamentally opposed to my goals. I don't want all the power that computers have brought to humanity to be concentrated in the hands of corporations, I want it to be free for anyone to use. I'm glad JavaScript is shitty and I wish it were shittier, because that would slow the growth of corporate control over our capabilities and data.