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It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

javascript.tm

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Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#321

Post by thayne »

rdtsc wrote: post #312
StableAlkyne wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun). Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever pro…

> Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense. That is why on one level I am surprised by the petition. They a…

> It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark.

IANAL, but I don't think that wouldn't be enough to keep the trademark.

Also the petition was a "we'll ask nicely first so we can all avoid the hastle and expense of legal procedings", they are now in the process of getting the trademark invalidated, but Oracle, illogically but perhaps unsurprisingly is fighting it.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#324

Post by dkersten »

leptons wrote: post #297
dkersten wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just rename it to "JS" (jay-ess) and forget about having the letters stand for anything.

Or how about just "J", like "C", and "B" before it.

Already taken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#325

Post by rdtsc »

thayne wrote: post #321
rdtsc wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense. That is why on one level I am surprised by the petition. They a…

> It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark. IANAL, but I don't think that wouldn't be enough to keep the trademark. Also the petition was a "we'll ask nicely first so we can all avoid the hastle and expense of legal procedings", they are now in the process of getting the trademark invalidated, but Oracle, illogically but perhaps unsurp…

I was just using it as an example of doing the absolute minimum. They could write a dumb Javascript debugger or something with minimal effort.

But yeah, IANAL either and just guessing, I just know Oracle is shady and if you challenge them legally they'll throw their weight around. And not sure if responding to a challenge with a new "product" is enough to reset the clock on it. Hopefully a the judge will see through their tricks.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#326

Post by morshu9001 »

ddtaylor wrote: post #320
morshu9001 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true. Non-exhaustive examples: let foo = 2 foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change let bar = {} bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property

The amount of weird TS I see that attempts to keep the JS style of code while getting the compiler to stop being mad is strange. I will see hundreds of line of type inference work, when they could have just made an actual type.

I feel like most people using TS are not doing it by personal choice but because someone else decided it

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#327

Post by morshu9001 »

anematode wrote: post #313
morshu9001 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true. Non-exhaustive examples: let foo = 2 foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change let bar = {} bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property

Even syntactically, TS is not a superset of JS: https://anemato.de/blog/js-to-ts

So it's a "sodium chloride" thing. Oh I hit this case too, and even this article looks familiar, probably cause I googled an error message

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#328

Post by mr_toad »

newsoftheday wrote: post #225
someguyiguess wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EcmaScript is an awful name. It sounds too similar to eczema or ectoplasm. Ugly name.

Agreed. WebScript would be better.

That’s always been my favorite proposal. WebScript is short and to the point.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#329

Post by criticalfault »

wiseowise wrote: post #87

1) Put JS in maintenance mode, don’t add any language features, only runtime 2) TS becomes the official mainline, whoever doesn’t like types can just keep writing as they did before, because valid JS is valid TS Problem solved, it’s not that difficult.

Or, just delete both and use dart.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#330

Post by hajile »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #139
siwatanejo wrote: post #3

I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.

I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.

Only if you change TS to have actually sound types and it enables good performance instead of enabling you to craft extraordinarily convoluted types for stuff that you should have never written in the first place.

Put another way, I'm fine with the TS syntax (and use TS because there aren't other choices), but the TS semantics aren't a good long-term solution.

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