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JavaScript at 20

brendaneich.github.io

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Re: JavaScript at 20

#221

Post by lol768 »

tracker1 wrote: post #217
lol768 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with it is that I click on the Hacker News link, step through the slides and then want to return back to the hacker news discussion to read the comments. Unfortunately, each slide is treated as a new history item and Firefox only remembers a finite amount of them so I then get stuck on the presentation with no way to get back to the site I was on before. Tempted to just inject this into each page I visit sin…

So, if you're on a search results page, and click next 20 times and then click back, do you expect to go back to the search form, or the previous results page?

Whilst I agree it'd make sense in that particular context for the back button to take me back a page in the results list, I'd rather the search results page made use of actual links which I can use via my browser to make a new HTTP request for another page of results. I dislike sites which insist on loading primary content with JavaScript, breaking the browser's loading feedback (animated icon, hidden favicon) in the process. These sites usually don't handle failed requests properly, either. If I were to post a form in Firefox to a site which happened to be temporarily down, Firefox would display a message explaining what went wrong and giving me the option to resubmit the entire form as many times as I want.

I also worry about the pushState function being misused to hide URLs in XSS attacks which involve query string parameters. It's clear you can also stop a user from going back from your page too, something I imagine could also be misused.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#222

Post by serge2k »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #86
mattmanser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works on OSes. We have a choice. In browsers, the OSes of the web, nope, just a bad language designed in 10 days that resists all attempts to make it not bad. It doesn't really matter if you like javascript, there's so many people who don't. Why do you get to dictate whether we can or can't develop on the web? You leave us with a horrible choice, use what we consider to be one of the worst modern languages, or not de…

> Works on OSes. We have a choice. No, it doesn't work on OSes. OSes only handle one language: the native machine code of that platform. Everything else must be compiled to it. This is exactly the same as browsers. Edit: At least two people disagree with me (-1 points) - would you mind elaborating why?

Your point is irrelevant, then difference then becomes the fact that at an OS level I can choose what code I compile into machine code and in the browser I can't.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#223

Post by rnhmjoj »

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…

https://wiki.haskell.org/The_JavaScript_Problem

Re: JavaScript at 20

#224

Post by magicalist »

frik wrote: post #159
magicalist wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is a lot more broken if you browse in IE6 than you appear to think. Some major sites work OK only because they had a financial interest (single digits of IE6 marketshare) until the last few years to maintain IE6 compatibility. This will degrade rapidly, but go off the very-well beaten path today and you'll find the web basically unusable. Backwards compatibility on the web has long been backwards compatibilit…

IE11 (Win8) and various devices that won't receive an update like many Android 4 and older iOS devices will be around for a few years! Sure, you can use a transpiler and serve JS5 the next ten years (2025). What do you plant to do? It seems most simply haven't thought about the problems lying ahead. Many were against the ES4/E4X changes that e.g. Firefox supported for some time, as they would have broken backwards co…

No, people have been against breaking compatibility with old source, like changing how certain statements are parsed and executed that would have made old code now in error. This is why strict mode is opt-in and larger ES4-like changes are dead in the water without careful design.

On the other side of things, though, new features that break in old browsers are added all the time. Try and run Date.now or Function.bind in old browsers and they'll immediately throw an error. It's only through polyfilling (and in some cases transpiling) that sites work in even IE8 today, and it will be the same situation in the future if a site wants to still work on an old Android or iOS device.

But yes, staying up to date as a user does depend on a newish browser being available for the platform you're running, and it would be great if old devices could continue to get updates. Really old iOS is out of luck, but Firefox supports back to Android 2.3, so users stuck there can download that browser to continue browsing the web.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#225

Post by glaslong »

codewithcheese wrote: post #12

I have learnt that if I click a javascript post and see a title and author slash screen and nothing else apparently I must start using my right arrow button.

I clicked around frustratedly for a while before just opening the dev tools and seeing it was a slideshow.

I want to call it a bad user experience, but maybe it's actually a clever way of limiting your audience to web developers.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#227

Post by tomcam »

copsarebastards wrote: post #194

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.

Press space or swipe or right arrow

Re: JavaScript at 20

#229

Post by copsarebastards »

palmer wrote: post #209
copsarebastards wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Lots of corporations that don't have your best interest at heart write software that doesn't live on the web, in any number of languages. Conversely, I can write open-source javascript that does something useful for you, that does not mine your data or do anything of that sort. I don't see how this relates to javascript.

The most pervasive and harmful companies all use JavaScript and couldn't do the harm they do without it (or, I suppose, an equivalent technology).

I would venture that I could solve all the problems you would solve with open source JavaScript with another programming language, because almost no program actually needs to be a web application.

Re: JavaScript at 20

#230

Post by AlexeyBrin »

frik wrote: post #139
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Polyfills can be used for pre-JS5 browsers. But can you polyfill "let" and "class" syntax keyword? No, but you can compile ES6 code using it to ES5 code.

Is the only solution to transpile ES6 to ES5 until 2025 or whenever IE11, Safari 7 and all current Smart TVs and Cars and what not have their end-of-life and simply vanish? Let's remember the problems with Internet Explorer 6 and its long actual lifetime. At the moment IE8 (WinXP), IE11 (Win8) as well as various other browsers will never receive an update on their platforms.

I'm pretty sure that at some point someone will create a library to test for ES6 compatibility when the JS code loads, I envision something like:

    if ES6 {
        use "mycode_js6.js";
    }
    else {
        use "mycode_js6_to_js5.js";
    }
or something similar.
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