Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
As somebody who's attempted to write object-oriented Javascript code, my response would be GOD NO.
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.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
I'm not sure why anyone would want JavaScript anywhere else. I believe that the only reason why JavaScript is "popular" in the first place is because it is the only option available for client-side processing on the web.
A lot of the pain of JS, like its inconsistent experience across browsers, can't really be held against it. Each browser has to implement JS according to its own interpretation of the standard, virtually guaranteeing a non-consistent experience across the board. I understand that. But what truly kills JavaScript for me is the lack of development tools and a solid reference. Debugging JS with an alert window is a horrible experience.
Again, why anyone would want this stuff everywhere is beyond me. I was shocked a long time ago when Palm Pre decided it was a good idea to use JavaScript for app development. Shocked I tell you. And look where that went. Like I said, the only reason I would consider JS "popular" on the web is because there is no other way to do client-side processing. It's literally our only choice (VBScript doesn't count).
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
It's a tolerable front end language for browsers. It's not as flexible or as fast as C++, but here's a newsflash to the "I'm living in Mom's basement crowd." It doesn't have to be.
It can suck up resources and not be especially fast and not be able to manipulate pointers or be much good for creating new classes and....
(sing it with me now) IT DOESN'T MATTER AND 99.99% OF WEB DEVELOPERS DON'T CARE.
Not all languages are C++, or Ruby, or Java or anything. Nor should they be. Use the right tool for the right job.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yes lets put all the work on the server. The server should handle all formatting and every single error check and lets wait for the server to respond and reload the entire page to say something is wrong. Lets not have the ability to hide or move objects, because we need to reload the page over and over and over again... Never mind CPUs are Really fast and the standard Desktop has ton of memory. Lets fill up the slower bandwidth with reloading the same information over again.
Sorry your post is screaming, I am not comfortable with JavaScript and it is effecting my 7337 status. So I will insult it so I can seem like I am skilled programmer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is the book that'll make you realise Javascript is OK:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748
It's not afraid to call out the bad parts, and to show you how to work around them. That's down to a rushed standardization process.
It doesn't deal with the DOM at all - after all, that's not part of JS.
It leaves you thinking JS is pretty neat, if you use it right.
I actually wish JavaScript and other client-side browser scripting would be done away with completely,
Why?
JS is not a particularly 'good' language.
People who say this very often don't know Javascript well at all. It's Lisp in C's clothing. It's actually a surprisingly elegant language -- it has a few warts, but they are almost certainly not what you're thinking of.
Google Douglas Crockford.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A-friggin-men. JavaScript is one of the few popular languages with first-class functions. How many JS-bashers have actually written something more than document.write() rubbish?
Mod parent up. Javascript, or ECMAscript gets a bad rap because a lot of code-pounders don't really know how to use it beyond defining a few c-style functions. It's a fairly powerful language once you understand the grammar. IE6 shoulders most of the blame for fucking it up - things that should work but need a bunch of ridiculous if(ie) incantations chase away most programmers from understanding the fundamentals of the language better. Once you realize that it's *even more* object oriented than Java(sun) then you begin to understand.
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. ^^)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's a poor Lisp in C's clothing. Give me LET already!
That's unfortunate... though perhaps now you could join the ranks of those with 1337 status?
OTOH, maybe you were referring to TEAT status, in which case... your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
it's just sometimes, it's a resource hog.
A bad workman always blames his tools
When you are given a screw driver to drive a nail, blaming the tool makes sense!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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".
You mean the Douglas Crockford that wrote http://www.crockford.com/javascript/private.html?
When I talk about an object oriented programming language I'm referring to a language that allows you to use the concepts of OOP in a *natural* and *homogeneous* way. I don't want to write a library and helper methods to write an OO program, I want to use the language.
It's OK if it doesn't has classes, and therefore inheritance does not have a place in Javascript, just stop trying to force it to be something that it was not meant to be (that is a general purpose language to write medium to large scale applications).
Santiago
I tend to go by the thickness of Crockford's book, vs the thickness of any "Complete Javascript" book when determining how much "good stuff" the language has.
I believe there are two reasons for this:
1. Crockford's writing is concise and to the point. It assumes prior programming knowledge.
2. Crockford's book does not concern itself with the DOM
So I believe a good chunk of the extra stuff in the fatter books is "here's what a loop is", "here's what if() does", and a bigger chunk yet is about HTML and CSS.
The logical fallacy is only because the quote has gotten distorted severely over the years. The original saying, translated to English from Old French, reads "Bad workers will never find a good tool." This version makes much more sense.
Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"One of the few popular languages with first-class functions"? Allow me to disagree but almost every dynamic language I know of has first-class functions.
Other languages, like C, C++, C#, also allow you to use functions as a data type.
I agree that, in some of them, their syntax does not make it easy to define functions as, for example, an argument, but you can define the function first, and pass it as an argument later if needed.
Closures are another thing altogether, but they are supported on many dynamic languages.
Santiago
The javascript hate probably isn't coming from people that have done web development.
It's probably coming from people that have done web browsing.
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.
How about those demos where Google was demonstrating V8, one of the "fastest" JS implementations available, which DOES use JIT to native machine code? They were PROUD to demo like a few hundred bouncing balls on a modern computer at not even 60 fps.
Written in C you could write an app to draw and compute the motion of tens of thousands of fucking balls at 60 fps on a modern computer.
Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "close" to C performance. Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "acceptable" performance.
I know exactly what a let form is. The code was not scoped so it was already on global level, declaring variables local in global scope doesn't do much. This did on global level exactly what let would in a procedural language. That is define the value for all following statements (for functional languages, all embedded statements). If you need let-embedding add a lamba expression (called function() in js), and you get nice scoped variables.
Sure.. but given JS expressive power, I dare you.. Especially compared to LISP.
If you ask for threading though, I yield ;)
How do you hide or move a DOM object in real time with css? For example how do you do this with css (jquery example)
$("p").click(function () { $("p").fadeOut("slow"); });
I'm not a javascript fan, but I have to use it daily for the tasks given to me.
Congratulations, you've just loaded 50-300kb of javascript (depending on your jQuery version) to fade out an element.
The "fading slowly" part is the ONLY bit that can't be accomplished with CSS. Hiding and moving is trivial, even cross-browser. Trust me.
I'm the lead programmer for a Fortune 300 site, and we're handed third-party content forced onto us by Marketing, et al, that uses Jquery, et al, to accomplish the SIMPLEST of tasks. I have yet to see something implemented in jQuery that would require more than 20 lines of javascript.
jQuery is NOT for programmers, it's for tools who think they're coding when they lay out HTML.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac