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It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

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

#371
post #60

They now have GoFundMe where they are soliciting donations for a discovery phase of a patent trademark cancellation request. They have just 50k USD out of 200k USD they are raising. (No idea if that's appropriate; from the outside, it seems like a lot of money, but also they are fighting Oracle which has unlimited money, so, yeah) For some reason it's not linked in the page itself. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-…

Not to nit-pic, but it's a Trademark cancellation - not a patent. The confusion probably came from the fact it's before the US Patent and Trademark Office.

to nitpick, short of holding evidence of a literal internal memoradum stating it, $100,000 or $100,000,000,000 won't be able to prove that a company has no intention to resume the use of a trademark at some point. the entire affair is pointless fantasy

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

#372

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 see this happening with people who are thrown in to coding TS, with little or no training / time to educate themselves.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the "interactive script" LiveScript or something else? --- Edit: The above makes it sound like there was another scripting language: > they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language.

yeah, LiveScript was renamed JavaScript.

And it was node before there was such thing, with LiveScript Server.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years we said bring something sane to browsers instead of trying to salvage js. At this point, though, why don't they just implement DOM bindings in wasm and make internets a better place overnight?

TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual pr…

> It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.

This argument is slightly backwards. This is essentially the argument used for "javascript in the backend" and "let's package the whole browser as application runtime so we can use javascript". The core of the argument is that javascript is ipso facto the best language/runtime to write any code in, including refactoring existing codebases. Bringing javascript out of the browser also means you have to write bindings for javascript and recreate the existing ecosystems anyway.

Even if you approach this from "single codebase across runtimes" angle, the conclusion to bridge the gap between browsers and languages with existing codebase, expertise and ecosystems is much more reasonable than rewrite everything in javascript.

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

#375

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.

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

How is ecma related with eczema, eczema has more syllables and it has a "z" in the middle that makes it completely different for crying out loud.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Dart and the Dartium browser

Dart looks ok, but looking at the Dart equivalents of JS examples like {foo: 1}, I'd rather use JS

There is sadly no equivalent to {foo: 1} in Dart. This difference stems from Darts class based object model while JSs is, as you probably know, prototype based

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

#377
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Dart and the Dartium browser

I'm sad every day that Dart didn't get bigger than it is. It's really a great language. Compiles to AOT too.

I know, it's underrated but it is what it is. I still continue using it.

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

#378
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider reading the article.

You should consider including whatever point you are trying to make in the comment itself, instead of just a swipe without any details.

> "Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.

They explained that in detail in the article. You don't need to remember correctly, you need to read the article. People who comment like you without doing the bare minimum, i.e. read what they're commenting on, should stop and think, what do you think you're contributing by doing that??

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual pr…

> It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use. This argument is slightly backwards. This is essentially the argument used for "javascript in the backend" and "let's package the whole browser as application runtime so we can use javascript". The core of the argument is that javascript is ipso facto the best…

Everything is already written in JavaScript. If we had WASM from the start and dozens of languages with different APIs we wouldn't be better off.

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual pr…

Its type system is also full of holes because it has to be compatible with JavaScript, being a superset.

Sure, the type system isn't perfect but it still beats 90% of mainstream languages in use today.
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