Trying To Bust JavaScript Out of the Browser

eldavojohn writes "If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity, you might want to skip this article, because Ars is reporting on efforts to take JavaScript to the next level. With the new ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the article points out a lot of positive things that have happened in the world of JavaScript. The article does a good job of citing some of the major problems with JavaScript and how a reborn library called CommonJS (formerly ServerJS) is addressing each of those problems. No one can deny JavaScript's usefulness on the front end of the web, but if you're a developer do you support the efforts to move it beyond that?"

Comments

Javascript is actually a great language

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Dynamically typed, object-oriented, with features like lexical closures that are usually only found in advanced programming languages like Lisp, Javascript is really a great language that has gotten a bad rap.

It reminds me of the lowly tomato, a member of the poisonous nightshade family of plants, which for years was considered to be inedible. These days you can't get a salad without it. Things change when you realize how useful something actually is.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[maraist]

With no feature-set testing capability coupled with the intent of handing off raw code to 3rd party virtual engines. With no 'reference' platform to validate code (with such simple things as which string functions are supported) and no useful error messages when making language library mistakes (nor any type-safety to determine it out of the box). And with respect to dynamicity, no equivalent 'perl -c foo.pl', 'use strict', or '-warn' pragma. No package namespaces. No legitimate mechanism of loading 3'rd party library files, much less a way of namespace collision resolution/isolation. No defined order of execution (some run in-line, others run on browser completely loaded, etc).

I'd instead say that Javascript is a frustrating language that's gotten too much rep. The fact that people migrate towards 3'rd party libraries to standardize simple programming operations (like jQuery / GWT) is a testament to how bad it's legacy has gotten - when trying to do 'real' work.

Sure a command-line javascript can define it's own standard and I'm confident that it can solve all these problems.. That's the great thing about standards - everybody's got one.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[Blakey Rat]

Most of Javascript's bad reputation come from the W3C's DOM. When the majority of programmers think "Javascript," they're actually thinking "Javascript + DOM," and since the DOM is so awful, they think Javascript is awful as well. Not so.

Pair Javascript with a decent library, and it's extremely powerful. Maybe not as suited for large projects as languages with namespaces, but its template system and introspection features are simply amazing. If anybody ever writes a program that evolves itself until it becomes super-intelligent and takes over the Earth, it'll probably be written in Javascript.

Correction to the parent, though: Javascript isn't an object-oriented language in the classic definition of the term... it lacks many features to make it truly OOP. Instead, it's based around object templating, which is nearly as powerful, but not the same thing.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[mcrbids]

Javascript makes many hard things simple, and many simple things hard.

Need to find out what the user typed in box foo? While most client libraries require fairly detailed memory schemes in order to keep track of which box is which, Javascript reduces all that to getElementById(); - a win in any programmer's book!

But in the reverse, what about trimming that input? The offense to the mind that you have to use a USER DEFINED FUNCTION for trimming just boggles the mind. Sure, there are libraries for this, blah blah but still, the truth remains that there is no trim() function. The lack of any kind of meaningful class structure makes the special word "this" almost worthless because you can't be sure consistently what it's referring to. (yes, it is possible to figure it out, but why should you have to?) If you delete an array key directly with the delete command, eg: `delete myArray[4];` the length property doesn't get updated even though the number of elements in the array does. (WTF?!?!)

So javascript has its warts. Lots and lots of them. It is clearly a hacked-together language that is only successful because of its ubiquity, which is the same reason why it evolves so extremely slowly, which is why we still have to manually implement things like trim(), and why so many of us are doomed to deal with javascript with all of its warts.

Javascript, however, has been free of the browser for some time, due to the Mozilla's JS engine being modular. They call it spidermonkey, and I actually considered using it as a replacement for PHP on the server side in order to keep langauages consistent. Unfortunately, nobody's embedded it into Apache as a module (with any kind of stability) so this means that js scripts would have to run as separate executables, which causes all kinds of performance and security problems.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[sydneyfong]

- The speed issue is largely due to the crappy implementations of Javascript, which are improving due to competition among browsers. Javascript can be JIT-ed. What you probably can't do is compile it to native code and expect it to have the speed of C/C++. But then would *you* run arbitrary native binary code off the web? Sandboxing makes things slow again.

- I'll give you the lack of threading.

- 2D/3D libraries - C doesn't have one in its standard, C++ doesn't have one, in fact most don't. But you're free to implement one. It just doesn't make too much sense having a full fledged 2D/3D library in the browser, since that's where most javascript code are used in.

- experimental language, as in first appearing in 1995, used extensively for almost 15 years. Of course most people never really utilize its full power, but it's not the fault of the language

- And you use a "mission-critical application" written in Javascript running inside a web browser?

Don't ditch the language due to poor implementation and crappy users.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[Ed Avis]

1. Of course the CPU-intensive parts of an app (compression, encryption, database things like DBM or SQLite) are still in native code and Javascript is just a wrapper. 2. The new generation of Javascript engines (Google's V8, Mozilla's Tracemonkey, etc) are one or two orders of magnitude faster than the Javascript interpreters of a few years ago. Not nearly as fast as native code, of course, but certainly good enough for a lot of applications. 3. You're right that threading and parallelism is missing. And also it's true that there aren't enough language bindings to good graphics libraries, though of course the browser itself is a powerful 2D engine for many tasks. Also, have you looked at WebGL, a Javascript binding to OpenGL?

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[MobyDisk]

Javascript is too dynamically typed. In my experience, testers constantly find bugs caused by type-mismatches, misspelled variable names, or other basic things that a compiler could have detected. The next most common set of problems is that Javascript generally doesn't report errors right away: they show up 200 lines later. Suppose a variable doesn't exist when it is referenced? It just makes one up right there on the spot, and assigns it a null value. That's terrible. Then there's the null -vs- undefined mess that constantly trips-up even experienced programmers.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[QuoteMstr]

Your comment is a decade out of date. No modern Javascript engine operates the way you describe. They cache object properties such that property access is fast, and independent of property name length.

Your 3D code is slow for other reasons. As a hunch, I bet you're doing a lot of unnecessary string-to-Number conversion.

Getting JS out of the browser is a *great* idea.

[Karellen]

Javascript is a beautiful, elegant, small and generally well-formed language. It has a couple of warts, but what language doesn't.

However, the way that Javascript interacts with web browsers, web pages and all other things web-like is a disgusting, crufty, bloated piece of shit. The DOM bindings are horrible, as far as they go, and they're woefully incomplete. The browser deficiencies in their implementations of the DOM bindings, and the browser-specific work-arounds needed to circumvent said deficiencies, are Lovecraftian nightmares.

(The willful violation of the javascript object model for document.all in HTML5 (see bottom of page) is one particularly nasty example of what the web has done/is doing to Javascript. If you know the JS object model well, think about what that violation really entails, and what it would take to write that special case into a JS engine, for one particular property, of one particular object, if you happen to be running in a particular environment (browser))

Getting Javascript out of the browser would be the best thing that could possibly happen to Javascript.

Can your language do this

[asc99c]

A lot of the comments are pointing out the problems in Javascript, and ignoring the problems in the big heavyweight languages like Java and C#.

It's not really in praise of Javascript, but a very good read is Joel's article 'Can Your Programming Language Do This?' It accurately points out a number of ways in which Java development very quickly takes up a lot of lines of code compared to more lightweight approaches. I personally prefer the light weight approach for many applications.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html

Your bias shows: You can't program shit!

[Hurricane78]

If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity,

In other words “If you can’t program, or if you can’t tell JavaScript from Java or Python,”.

The new versions of JS are really sweet. But most “web-developers” can’t even write proper code in the old one. Which is quickly visible, if you enable strict warnings, and force the interpreter to the newest version. Most scripts throw warnings or fail after that.

I say JS and Python are on par with each other. But they use very different paradigms. JS uses prototypes. And that is what most people do not understand. See it like this: Everything is an object (including functions, which allows really powerful functional programming), everything can be written literally (including objects with functions), and everything has a prototype on which it is based and can be the prototype for other objects/prototypes.

So you build your object, and then use it as a prototype to create other objects with added functionality or changed data.
The elegance of this is, that inheriting and instantiation really becomes the same thing. And in my eyes, the less rules a language needs, while still having all the power, the better and more elegant it is.

It’s crazy how, with the newest version, I can write it nearly 1:1 like I would write it in Haskell! You can’t imagine how happy I was, when I noticed that I would practically a “scriptable Haskell in the browser”. Of course it does not have the type strictness of Haskell. But that is kinda the point.

It even has regular expression literals.

What’s a bit messy, is DOM. Perhaps because it’s a “design by committee with no own sense of reality” (= no leadership) API.

Then again, I’m all for more languages in the browser. Python, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Haskell and Java are good candidates. C/C++ and Perl are not. (Perhaps Perl 6 in 2051. ^^)

Re:Why bother?

[lainproliant]

A reason that some people feel JavaScript "isn't a good language" is because of the hurdles in developing cross-platform client-side web solutions. Most of this can be blamed on IE not following W3C standards for things like XML DOM (XMLHttpRequest). These hurdles are becoming less and less with IE's slowly waining market share. I used to have a similar opinion of JavaScript: that it was bloated and/or unnecessary. This changed when I actually began to learn JavaScript, and realized that it was a very elegant and capable language. Many APIs and toolkits already offer JavaScript scripting. Qt4 in particular, with its support of CSS style sheets and JavaScript scripting, is a fine example of how web programming paradigms can be used to enhance desktop applications. I think it would be nice to see JavaScript emerge as a ubiquitous "application scripting language".

Most of you don't know what you are talking about

[elnyka]

A lot of the "JS sux" crowd seem stuck in the Netscape era, recalling the horrors of javascript coding on geocities-look-alike websites that bloomed and died (like red tides) during the dot-com boom.

RIAs that work well on IE and FireFox (the predominant browsers used in commercial sectors) are being developed today in JavaScript with jquery, gwt or dojo. And crappy client-side applications are being written as well. But anyone with a modicum of work experience knows that the responsibility of writing shitty applications rest squarely on the developer.

Some of the crappiest, worst code I've seen had been written on Java, C# and C++. And also, some of the clearest, most maintainable and elegant pieces of code I've seen were written in FoxPro and JavaScript. Every single language sucks in one aspect or another.

A good software professional, a pragmatic one, he looks at the language, at the tool, works around the problems and gets the stuff done with it in a clean manner.

Shitty programmer OTOH will screw it up no matter what.

And coding divas will get all emotionally attached to a given language, throwing subjective infantile rants towards whatever language they don't like recalling anecdotal memories mixed with technical impressions too superficial to be called "first-hand educated knowledge".

I don't like JS global scoping and lack of namespaces, but I do love it's object prototyping capabilities and support for functional programming. You can write some really complex client-side, browser-running systems with a brevity and clarity you cannot match with Java or C#.

That is the reality. It is a perfect tool? Nope. It is a good tool for what it is intended to? Yes. You can't get emotional against a tool, specially if you have never been able (or are incapable or have never assigned) to create a good NON-TRIVIAL application with it.