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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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.