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Crockford is not Eich.
I stand corrected! Still, good to see he realized the error of his ways and the damage caused.
Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
31–40 of 202 posts
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#32He's got a point. TypeScript alleviates some pain, but I still feel like JS is not a great language. I have some nostalgic love for it because I used to be "the JavaScript guy" at the beginning of my career. But ever since I started using TS and Go, using Vanilla JS feels like fighting code smells and complexity all the time. At the same time, I acknowledge and appreciate how much JS has improved.
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#33> But as increasingly complex software targets the browser, developers are wrangling codebases where UI is not the dominant source of complexity, like CAD tools and scientific data visualization.
I guess WASM is already taking this place?
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#34First we need a good alternative. JavaScript may not be the best, but it works well.
He has been saying this for a decade. I had to double check the dates to see if it was even relevant.
A problem is that the 3 problems that the articles highlights have been fixed with incremental fixes. Performance with V8. Object lifecycle management has had improvements from ES6 WeakMap and WeakRef although JS will never have RAII. ES6 also added more data structures.
No new alternative will be able to keep up with javascript's incrementalism
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#35> "[...] we are crushing ourselves with the accumulated complexity we’ve piled on top of bad foundations [...]" The same could be said about plain HTML/CSS though. I think the author is correct overall and I don't really see improvement on the horizon. WebAssembly, while great that it exists, can morph browsers into some poor mans virtual operating system and this can lead to a less open web. We already see more clos…
> The same could be said about plain HTML/CSS though. Genuine question: How much of the complexity of working with HTML/CSS is unnecessary and how much is inherent to the problem they solve? Is it as bad as with Javascript? I would say that we, for the most part, have a very clear idea of how we could (theoretically) replace Javascript with something much better. I don't know of alternative layout languages, so I don…
> How much of the complexity of working with HTML/CSS is unnecessary
Talk to Google.
They are the ones aggressively increasing the API surface of the Web (driven largely by commercial reasons e.g. ChromeOS) often without much thought to the security, privacy and performance implications.
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#36> "[...] we are crushing ourselves with the accumulated complexity we’ve piled on top of bad foundations [...]" The same could be said about plain HTML/CSS though. I think the author is correct overall and I don't really see improvement on the horizon. WebAssembly, while great that it exists, can morph browsers into some poor mans virtual operating system and this can lead to a less open web. We already see more clos…
Discoverability for communities is a really good point. I wonder if any chat software exists that allows easy/good indexing by search engines.
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#37Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#38[flagged]
> The new COBOL is here to stay. Very much. :) We have a javascript interpreter parked at the L2 Lagrange point.[1] As far as the preservation of human made artefacts go that is basically one of the safest places it can be. When us and all of our earthly possessions have long crumbled to dust that thing is still going to be out there. (Albeit very likely drifting without power around the sun.) 1: Event-driven James W…
Yeah, the disaster is borderline interplanetory. It will spread to Mars and Moon soon enough.
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#39> "[...] we are crushing ourselves with the accumulated complexity we’ve piled on top of bad foundations [...]" The same could be said about plain HTML/CSS though. I think the author is correct overall and I don't really see improvement on the horizon. WebAssembly, while great that it exists, can morph browsers into some poor mans virtual operating system and this can lead to a less open web. We already see more clos…
Nobody will ever agree on an alternative. And, none of the attempted alternatives have ever taken off because the velocity of javascript's incrementalism is far greater than the velocity of any new shiny thing.
JS has the weight of the largest corporations in the world behind it that don't want to lose their investments
Re: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
#40I get his point, but it may be too late for it as some applications even have backends in js..
However I agree that it is somewhat problematic that instead of creating new languages, we create frameworks (sometimes frameworks based on other frameworks like nextjs). Especially considering how messy js can be.