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The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

brendaneich.github.com

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Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#31

Post by cygx »

bcantrill wrote: post #17

Aside from my personal distaste for his backing up the semantic truck and dumping it into ES6, I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript. Without V8, there is no JavaScript on the server-side (sorry, Rhino and SpiderMonkey), there is no Chakra and there is no TraceMonkey/JagerMonkey/IonMonkey: given that JavaScript had survived f…

> I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript.

Chill. It's a timeline of language evolution - I don't see how V8 is relevant. Mentioning the AJAX revolution isn't strictly relevant either, but serves the purpose of separating orthodox from next-gen Javascript.

Btw, while work on V8 started 2 years before work on TraceMonkey, apparently the latter was announced first.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#32

Post by iSnow »

Is it just me or does the proposed ES6-standard smell of heavy feature creep?

- we get classes _and_ modules _and_ typed objects. Yeah, those all have their merits and are all somehow different, but having them all seems to add only slightly more value while increasing the overall difficulty of the language considerably.

- same with macros and codegens. While they certainly are different animals, there seems to be overlap in the area they will be employed.

To me, there seems to be feature envy on the side of the JS crowd to try and bake every nice feature into the language. I am not convinced this is the right direction.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#33

Post by z0w0 »

daeken wrote: post #28
pcwalton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is never going to be part of the Web. Content will never be able to execute Rust code. If Mozilla had been proposing to integrate Rust as a potential client-side scripting language (which wouldn't happen to begin with), the process would have been totally different.

On a side note, has there been any experimentation with Rust on NaCl or with Emscripten? I'd love to write some web demos with it.

Rust can't run without it's runtime yet, which means the runtime needs to be wrapped into JavaScript code on the Emscripten side. The runtime needs some important parallel and memory functionality and last I heard most of it isn't easily to implement in JavaScript (workers and typed arrays and other HTML5 goodies probably bring it closer to being feasible).

NaCL is a more realistic target - in theory it should be as simple as making the compiler use NaCL's GCC instead of the system's C compiler. However, I don't know about how strict the sandboxing is, there might be certain things that the generated Rust code isn't allowed to do.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#34

Post by ruggeri »

masklinn wrote: post #27
bcantrill wrote: post #17

Aside from my personal distaste for his backing up the semantic truck and dumping it into ES6, I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript. Without V8, there is no JavaScript on the server-side (sorry, Rhino and SpiderMonkey), there is no Chakra and there is no TraceMonkey/JagerMonkey/IonMonkey: given that JavaScript had survived f…

> I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript Bullcrap. Why would V8 deserve any more mention than Spidermonkey (which had none, by the way) in a talk about the semantics and language evolutions of javascript when it's Gecko/Spidermonkey which pioneered and implemented roughly 95% of these evolutions in the first place? Why would i…

> You may want to take this advice for yourself, your comment is dismissive, insulting, contemptuous and contemptible.

It was none of those things. You two merely disagree.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#35

Post by davidw »

bcantrill wrote: post #17

Aside from my personal distaste for his backing up the semantic truck and dumping it into ES6, I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript. Without V8, there is no JavaScript on the server-side (sorry, Rhino and SpiderMonkey), there is no Chakra and there is no TraceMonkey/JagerMonkey/IonMonkey: given that JavaScript had survived f…

> Without V8, there is no JavaScript on the server-side

The first implementation of server side Javascript was nearly 20 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScri...

Naturally, it was never all that popular, but... it has been around.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#36

Post by davidw »

doesnt_know wrote: post #26
Ygg2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just used the mouse wheel and it always went the right order, even if vertical.

Same, but it still seems unintuitive and pointless. Why not just keep them going from left to right? I'm pretty sure the target audience for this only really cares about the content and anything else just gets in the way.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#37

Post by mun2mun »

eranation wrote: post #23
bcantrill wrote: post #17

Aside from my personal distaste for his backing up the semantic truck and dumping it into ES6, I think it's a bit annoying -- to the point of being disrespectful -- that Brendan doesn't mention V8 in his history of JavaScript. Without V8, there is no JavaScript on the server-side (sorry, Rhino and SpiderMonkey), there is no Chakra and there is no TraceMonkey/JagerMonkey/IonMonkey: given that JavaScript had survived f…

I wonder what he would have said about TypeScript, it seems that it was launch after this conference (though there is a large chance he was in the loop, no pun intended)

He seems ok with it http://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/254010839701544960
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