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JavaScript right on the hardware

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Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#281

Post by lmm »

coldtea wrote: post #111
eob wrote: post #28

First off, this is cool. It is tremendously exciting to see the bar for hardware hacking getting lower and lower. To the people complaining "Why JS? C is fine!", remember that once the complaint was "Why C? ASM is fine!". At the same time, I can't help but grin that we on the CS side find a way to erase all the gains in performance and efficiency as soon as the EE guys make them. There has to be come kind of universa…

> At the same time, I can't help but grin that we on the CS side find a way to erase all the gains in performance and efficiency as soon as the EE guys make them. That's one way to see it. Another is that we don't erase them: we put them to use so programming can be more widespread, easier and more ambitious in scope. (E.g. you cannot practically write a 10.000.000 line program in ASM, whereas you can in C. Or you ca…

Yeah, but writing a large, maintainable program in Javascript is if anything even harder than in C.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#282

Post by lmm »

scriptproof wrote: post #225
10098 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly, instead of killing it off or at least limiting it to the browser, we're trying to shove that abomination everywhere. This is sad.

I like JavaScript. It is a very intelligent language, far ahead in its design than more recent products like Dart. If you was not insanely focused on its drawbacks, you could see its qualities too.

Your post is content-free. What do you consider explicit advantages of Javascript over Dart? Because to my eyes Javascript looks like a similar language with no type system and terrible scoping.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#283

Post by tomlu »

coreyja wrote: post #109
10098 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have much problem with programming an embedded device in a high-level language, but why JS specifically? Why not Lua, which just as fast, and is better than javascript in many respects?

Slightly off topic, but is it just me or has Lua gotten a lot of attention on HN in the past weekish? I haven't heard much of Lua before but recently it seems to have come up a lot more. And even more off topic (sorry), what makes Lua better/different than other scripting languages? EDIT: On jacobwcarlson suggestion, I Googled Lua vs Python, and found this Wiki, http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython Not a speed c…

Lua is elegant, small and fast, especially when you're using LuaJIT. It's the language I reach for first when I need to embed a scripting language in a system (perhaps to replace configuration files).

Its only real drawback is a lack of libraries/package manager compared to, say, Python/Ruby (respectively). I guess some people might miss built-in support for classes.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#284

Post by pjmlp »

14113 wrote: post #276
coldtea wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, I can't help but grin that we on the CS side find a way to erase all the gains in performance and efficiency as soon as the EE guys make them. That's one way to see it. Another is that we don't erase them: we put them to use so programming can be more widespread, easier and more ambitious in scope. (E.g. you cannot practically write a 10.000.000 line program in ASM, whereas you can in C. Or you ca…

You can. Rollercoaster tycoon was originally written in pure ASM. Allowing programming to be more widespread is a noble cause, but there comes a point (and I think it is approaching rapidly) where you layer so much abstration between the machine and the programmer, that they're guaranteed to write poor, or at least slow code. We need to find a middle ground, and I think javascript pulls in the wrong direction to this…

Like Lotus 1-2-3 as well, and lots of other software back in the 8 and 16 bit days.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#285

Post by pjmlp »

Ygg2 wrote: post #237
14113 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally it worries me because people can build whatever they want and call themselves "programmers". It encourages a state in the industry when knowing about data structures, hardware, turing machines or the other fundamentals of computer science are considered unecessary. Perhaps they are, from a business standpoint. However, it will eventually inhibit growth of the discipline as a whole. A common rebuttal to tha…

As opposed to studying for five years in a college, learning Java and programming in Java exclusively, never learning anything outside the Java and never perfecting? People's curiosity is what motivates them to experiment and learn new things, not how or what language they learn (I started with Basic which apparently causes brain damage and I'm getting along fine). If they are curious on their own, they'll pick up da…

> As opposed to studying for five years in a college, learning Java and programming in Java exclusively, never learning anything outside the Java and never perfecting?

Uau!? Do such universities exist?

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#286

Post by nilliams »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #267
dkuntz2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how it works, I just find it worse, by far. There's a whole lot more overhead to getting it working, specifically all of the foo.prototype stuff, and it doesn't require that everything be together. Sure, it's kinda nice that you're able to extends objects later on, but I'd rather have everything neatly declared in one place. It definitely does not "give me a whole new opinion on what OOP means", it furthers my…

It's very good to see more and more people openly admitting that JavaScript's prototype-based OO approach just isn't practical. For far too long now we've had to hear JavaScript advocates go on and on about how good JavaScript's approach is. Yet over and over we see developers being forced to fake a limited subset of class-based OO one way or another, just to get their work done effectively. Of course, there are mult…

>> In any sizable JavaScript code base, especially if third-party libraries are used, these incompatibilities can become a very real issue, very quickly.

Whether you use constructor functions, object literals, or the module pattern to structure your code in an OO-like manner, they all result in 'functions hung off objects' which can be called in the same way: object.foo(), I don't see the very real compatibility issue you're talking about.

>> It's very good to see more and more people openly admitting that JavaScript's prototype-based OO approach just isn't practical.

It's plenty practical, I will welcome ES6's class keyword for the clearer semantics, but this is simply vague FUD.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#287

Post by naunga »

14113 wrote: post #277
polarix wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people do know javascript. Implementations differ, but are getting more standardized as time goes on. Without the DOM and browser environment APIs, it gets a lot simpler. Do you think fewer people actually know javascript than actually know C++?

C++ is a bad example. C itself is mindblowinly complex, and C++ layers more on top of that. A better example might be Python, or possibly Lua. Languages that have been designed, rather than grown organically, unlike C++/C/Javascript.

C++ was grown organically? I think Bjarne Stroustrup would disagree.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#288

Post by ontouchstart »

nfoz wrote: post #263
ontouchstart wrote: post #118

JavaScript is the most deployed dynamic embedded programming language in the world (consider all the web browsers on desktop computers and mobile devices). If we expland this environment to customer hardware, we also expand our view of UI/UX to a different level. We should thank Moore's law.

Are you implying that JS developers know more about UI/UX than others? Most websites have horrible usability, ranging from "everything in CSS popups!" to "every site uses a different widget toolkit, deficient in new and exciting ways"..... I hope I just don't understand your comment.

I am not a big fan of the visual UI/UX either. My point is that there is more to the UI/UX than widgets and popups. With JS on hardware, we might have a new way to design HCI other than those pretty wireframes in Photoshop.

IMHO, JS is a laguage designed for APIs, which is good for exploring ideas and protyping. There is always a way to push the performance to another layer, like CSS boosted by GPU.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#289

Post by naunga »

farnsworth wrote: post #7

Forgive me for not being hip but why try so hard to put JS in new places? It seems to be just an unfortunate historical accident that JS is one of the most popular languages in the world - does anyone actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages? Could we invest in CoffeeScript instead, at the very least?

Full disclosure I'm not a JavaScript programmer. I dink around with it. I can work with it. I understand it enough to maintain the code I need to at work, but I'm not a "JS Guy".

At the heart of my programming heraldry is C. From there I branched out into C++, Java, Perl, C#, etc.

In effect you are comparing JavaScript to Assembler, since CoffeeScript compiles to JS. I'm certain most people would agree that this is a ridiculous comparison, because as quirky as JavaScript can be it is far easier to work with than assembler. I wish people would stop making that comparison (I've been guilty of it myself, but I've stopped as of late).

In my view, the popularity of JavaScript comes down to two things: Interactivity and instant gratification.

I first played with JavaScript while in college in 1995. It blew my mind that I could just put some code into a text file and load it into Netscape and see stuff happen. No compiling, no linking, just text making the browser do things, and unlike Java it did not require me to upload an applet and hope that my target user had a JRE installed.

Today you have things like Chrome dev tools and JS Fiddle where you can get even more of that.

The velocity of going from idea to web app (site) is a lot nicer for most people.

IMHO JavaScript is the programming equivalent of an LLC. It's quick to start, low capital investment, and doesn't expose you to a lot of risk.

Anyhow...that's my two cents that I had to throw in before more veins in my head popped.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#290

Post by mwcampbell »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #264
thedufer wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's just unnecessarily offensive. I'm proficient in Python, Java, and C, and was at some point also fluent in PHP, Ruby, and Lisp. While I wouldn't particularly enjoy coding in Javascript, CoffeeScript is, to date, the best language I've worked with. I debug in JavaScript, so I'm not that far away from it. Why is "class-based OO" necessary? There's nothing wrong with prototypal inheritance. The way modules a…

There's nothing "offensive" about pointing out realities, even if they may be painful for some people to accept. I find your arguments somewhat odd. You do openly admit that you "wouldn't particularly enjoy coding in Javascript". People don't say such things about good programming languages, especially when arguing in favor of them to some extent. I also find it odd that you argue that there's nothing wrong with prot…

> There's nothing "offensive" about pointing out realities, even if they may be painful for some people to accept.

The problem is that your comments about JS tend to contain more hyperbole and opinion than undisputed reality.

JS obviously has flaws. But so does English. It's good to have a natural language that a large percentage of the world's population, across nationalities and ethnic groups, can speak. I think the same applies in programming. Programming languages are not just for telling a computer what to do; they're also for collaborating with other programmers. And once a code base is written in a particular language, it's often hard to make a case for rewriting it in a different language. So why not use a language that is popular, is cross-platform, is vendor-neutral, has multiple optimized implementations, and is likely to remain popular and well-supported for many years to come? JavaScript is that language.

FWIW, I have much more experience with Python and Lua than with JavaScript. I also do some work in C++. Yet, despite JavaScript's flaws, I'm defending it as a general-purpose programming language.

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