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What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

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Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#211

Post by BiteCode_dev »

spyke112 wrote: post #205
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I just tried: setInterval('console.log(1 + 1)', 1000); And it works. It's a big eval(). Stealing this for my next JS training, beginners always have a hard time with callbacks, so it's a good first step to actually explain the benefits of callbacks.

Why would you direct new comers attention to eval'esque functionality? They should stay far far away from it. Come to think of it, everyone should stay away from eval functionality!

Because students can understand "code being run every x seconds" easier than "reference to function being resolved then called every x seconds".

Once they do, you show the problems with it and show why callbacks are better.

When it comes to pedagogy, I'll use every trick I can.

And I always win.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#212

Post by kls »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #165

For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex (who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard that one in a while), DEC, HP (still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?), Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO, SGI, Sybase, ...

Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back then.

Metroworks built dev tooling and IDE's the where big on Mac's back in the day and they where awesome for their time.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#213

Post by z3t4 »

austincheney wrote: post #202
z3t4 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript has a very high learning curve. But it becomes great once you are fluent. When manipulating the DOM it kinda sucks that you can't just monkey-path attributes, you have to use el.setAttribute. The DOM is also very slow. But the DOM do a lot of work - ever tried to make your own UI framework from scratch only using low level GUI calls? z-index, styling with CSS, screen-reader support, etc.

> The DOM is also very slow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22391509 > I still have people argue with me that the DOM is slow even though all the evidence and browser vendors claim updates to the DOM is simply switching a bit in memory. In other words many web developers have utterly no idea how their platform works. I guess not much has changed in 25 years. Most developers still fear the language, have no idea…

I meant creating a GUI from scratch. Creating a GUI using the DOM is easy. Working with the DOM overall is simple. What I mean is that the DOM do so much work for us (that we take for granted).

What I mean by slow is for example adding a element to the screen, or updating some text. Compared to for example everything that happens on the screen in a 3d game.

I do everything using vanilla JS and I cannot understand why anyone would use a web framework, (although most web project does). I do however have a vague memory that the learning curve was fairly steep, as I have been working with vanilla JS for over 20 years. (whereas the average developer has only used JS for one year) it wasn't until I started to use JS full stack (with Node.JS) that I started to like it!

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#214

Post by mcv »

agumonkey wrote: post #103
btilly wrote: post #34

JavaScript is a fascinating example of Microsoft successfully getting a giant own goal. The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen. This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish…

game is not over, MS has typescript momentum now

Yeah, but that doesn't drive any kind of lock-in.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#215

Post by goto11 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #210
goto11 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Method chaining (aka. fluent syntax) is not really comparable to bind. Bind is nested lambdas, which means an operation might be executed zero or multiple times depending on the bind. In method chaining, each call will be executed exactly once, unless an exception is thrown. The use of method chaining in jQuery is cool, but it is not very similar to Haskell.

> which means an operation might be executed zero or multiple times depending on the bind. That's what the jQuery API does behind the scene of the chained calls. That's one of the key reasons of its success actually. $(".foo").foo().bar() will execute n times, for each of the n DOM elements you matched with ".foo", including one or zero.

No, foo() and bar() will each execute once, but the methods performs some underlying operation on each item in the underlying collection.

Yes this is a cool and useful pattern, but it is not bind. It is just a different thing.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#216

Post by piva00 »

z3t4 wrote: post #213
austincheney wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The DOM is also very slow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22391509 > I still have people argue with me that the DOM is slow even though all the evidence and browser vendors claim updates to the DOM is simply switching a bit in memory. In other words many web developers have utterly no idea how their platform works. I guess not much has changed in 25 years. Most developers still fear the language, have no idea…

I meant creating a GUI from scratch. Creating a GUI using the DOM is easy. Working with the DOM overall is simple. What I mean is that the DOM do so much work for us (that we take for granted). What I mean by slow is for example adding a element to the screen, or updating some text. Compared to for example everything that happens on the screen in a 3d game. I do everything using vanilla JS and I cannot understand why…

I worked with vanilla JS for some time (before Prototype.js or jQuery existed) and used a bunch of incantations of different libraries and frameworks over the years and I cannot understand why anyone would choose to use JS for platforms where you can use any other language (aka... any platform that isn't a browser).

No construct or design decision of JS is better than in other languages, the lack of a basic standard library hurts a lot. Dependency management was inexistent until recently, the same for a lot of basic constructs, data types and other utilities that should be baked into any modern language.

The current landscape of JS is so convoluted and with such a varying level of quality that is intractable for me just trying to get things done without getting into the community and everything around it, it's not an easy tool to use and it's not an ergonomical one.

I have used JS for the past 15+ years for different kinds of software and I dislike it, not intensely but I'd never choose to work solely on JS. Yes, you can be productive in it but there are much better tools for most of the job it does around, its only power was to be the only language you could use to script a browser and I hope that WASM kills that.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#217

Post by BiteCode_dev »

goto11 wrote: post #215
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which means an operation might be executed zero or multiple times depending on the bind. That's what the jQuery API does behind the scene of the chained calls. That's one of the key reasons of its success actually. $(".foo").foo().bar() will execute n times, for each of the n DOM elements you matched with ".foo", including one or zero.

No, foo() and bar() will each execute once, but the methods performs some underlying operation on each item in the underlying collection. Yes this is a cool and useful pattern, but it is not bind. It is just a different thing.

In JS speech, I said "==", and you said "!==".

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#218

Post by rwmurrayVT »

kls wrote: post #212
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #165

For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex (who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard that one in a while), DEC, HP (still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?), Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO, SGI, Sybase, ...

Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back then. Metroworks built dev tooling and I…

Computer Associates is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They changed their name at some point to CA Technologies and ended up being acquired by Broadcom sometime around the end of 2018/2019.

Another fun fact is that they had a huge accounting scandal around the dotcom crash involving a 35 day month! They ended up settling for around 300kk USD.

Edit: They settled for 225kk USD. Sanjay got 12 years in prison and an 8kk USD fine.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#219

Post by nickthemagicman »

JimDabell wrote: post #204
nickthemagicman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words: 1: to fix js chaining 2: to fix js compatibility Ergo to make js suck less.

No. The first is incoherent, the second ignores half my comment.

You're splitting hairs with that half of your comment so I ignored it.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#220

Post by agumonkey »

mcv wrote: post #214
agumonkey wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

game is not over, MS has typescript momentum now

Yeah, but that doesn't drive any kind of lock-in.

True but I kinda believe that MS understood that these days are over (not only for them but in general)
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