More Info On Google's Alternative To JavaScript

I'm Not There (1956) writes "Last week the news came in that Google is supposed to unveil 'Dart,' a new programming language for browser-based apps. Now an internal email from late last year describes this project as the 'high risk/high reward' path [of Google's browser development strategy]. Apps in this new language will run in a VM on browsers that support it, and can be translated to JS for other browsers. 'Performance, developer usability, and ability to be tooled' are the main characteristics of the language." The email notes that Google will be working on ECMAScript Harmony in the near term, but they describe the project as ultimately doomed by "fundamental problems" with ECMAScript. It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.

Comments

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.

Yes, it is interesting to hear some random person say that Google doesn't know what they are doing. Wait a minute, it isn't interesting at all.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting to see how you failed to consider that the aforementioned person was saying that Google really knew what they were doing. You must be one of the few persons on earth for whom the "don't be evil" piece of propaganda still works.

they should just create GLang

[alen]

and make you code anything for their services in GLang so that they will be their own part of the internet separate from the open one

Re:they should just create GLang

[North Korea]

Yep, pretty much like they did with Google App Engine. Lock the developers down first, then raise prices significantly. Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning. So much for Google's openness. Their new business motto seems to be borrowed from Microsoft - "Embrace, extend and extinguish".

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... they created a hosting platform you don't have to use, and you call it 'locking developers down', and then raising prices?

It was obvious from day one that they were ultimately going to charge, and charging is what is going to make App Engine viable. Somehow you got from this to embrace and extend?

Re:they should just create GLang

[North Korea]

It wasn't free from the beginning either, you know. Now they just seriously limited the resources and raised prices. Since slashdotters think Google is so much about open source and free software, why is App Engine backend proprietary. I'm not even asking something like their search engine code, just the App Engine backend so that people can move to other service providers with their projects if Google charges too much. Oh yeah, but Google doesn't want that. They won't open source it because then they couldn't lock down developers.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything should be free, of course. Software, hosting, lunch. Everything.

Re:they should just create GLang

[NeutronCowboy]

Oh look, another recent user who consistently bashes Google for not being "open", and praises Microsoft. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the recent obvious shills who appeared on Slashdot?

Nice disinformation campaign you got going there. I mean, it's totally new that if you code for a specific platform, you might have some trouble porting that code. Or does your .NET code run as is on Linux?

Re:they should just create GLang

[aliquis]

Because they are so likely to have Dart a closed down project?

Re:they should just create GLang

[NeutronCowboy]

Since slashdotters think Google is so much about open source and free software, why is App Engine backend proprietary. I'm not even asking something like their search engine code,

Now I know you're either utterly fucking retarded, or really just shilling for one of Google's major competitors. You don't need to know the backend to port your project. All you need to know is the APIs of the new system, and do some work. Just like for every other platform project. Don't like it? Write your own platform. Also, there's absolutely nothing to be gained for anyone to know the detailed heuristics Google uses to streamline its search, outside of SEOs. The rest of the algorithm is very well known.

I seriously, seriously hate the idea that corporations have that the way to advertise to people is to impersonate someone and then post paid bullshit. It's too bad you're hiding behind an anonymous handle, because otherwise your company would be on my immediate shitlist... though I suspect it probably is. Corporations who engage in this kind of crap are generally shady.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

"Praises Microsoft"? Where does he do that exactly?

Re:they should just create GLang

[egamma]

Or does your .NET code run as is on Linux?

I'm not a programmer, nor a shill, but isn't that what Mono does?

Re:they should just create GLang

[North Korea]

Now I know you're either utterly fucking retarded, or really just shilling for one of Google's major competitors. You don't need to know the backend to port your project. All you need to know is the APIs of the new system, and do some work. Just like for every other platform project. Don't like it? Write your own platform.

And would you say this same thing about Microsoft and their Office file formats? "Don't like MS Office file formats? Write your own and don't support them!" Google has seriously brainwashed you. They do all the same bad things Microsoft, Facebook and many other "bad" companies do but you're too clueless to see it.

Re:they should just create GLang

[North Korea]

Or does your .NET code run as is on Linux?

Yes it does, and Microsoft has fully published the details so people can make their own implementations. If Mono is lacking behind on something, well, that's Mono's developers fault.

On the other hand, Google App Engine is competely closed. No published docs, no information about the API's, no open source code. Fully proprietary platform, from Google.

Re:they should just create GLang

[wisty]

It's probably a misunderstanding. He thinks Google is sitting on some goldmine, with their appengine, not giving any love to the community. Given how slow appengine runs, and how long it took them to even untangle the fact that it is slow as a bubble-sort implemented in Ruby sitting on a virtual Windows machine on a shared Pentium IV, Google is probably just embarrassed to release it. /exaggeration

Re:they should just create GLang

[Guspaz]

Yes, although rarely unmodified (in my personal experience trying to get a few small utilities that I'd written). Getting even simple .NET software to run on Mono requires that you either developed with Mono in mind from the start, or you "port" your code to Mono. You need to work around bits of the .NET framework that Mono doesn't support, work around Mono bugs (obviously the same bugs don't exist in Mono and Microsoft's implementation), figure out solutions anywhere you used Windows API calls (.NET has some glaring gaps that still require Win32 API calls, like using aero glass, freeing a tray icon, etc), etc.

If you stuck pretty close to core .NET functionality, it's probably a ton easier than porting to a different OS/language would normally be, but if you've used any other .NET frameworks (like XNA) then you might as well be porting to a different language anyhow.

Re:they should just create GLang

[BitZtream]

No published docs, no information about the API's

So how do developers know how to write code that works in AppEngine?

The APIs are infact documented.

The APIs have in fact been copied and Google actually hosts the code (though they only host, don't think they have any other involvement than it sitting on their servers)

http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

Pretty much the same result as with .NET isn't it.

Re:they should just create GLang

[ultranova]

Nice disinformation campaign you got going there.

But strangely, naming himself "North Korea" seems to be pretty honest about his dishonesty.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what Mono does, although mono's support for the .Net framework is only partly complete, and Microsoft has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Mono. Everything MS develops is entirely just for windows. Even the open-source files they use get rereleased under a microsoft open-source licence that says your code can only be read on systems running Windows. Its an open-source virus.

Re:they should just create GLang

[NeutronCowboy]

I know. Kinda weird. I suspect it might have to do with him leaving his first comments in the North Korea thread.

Re:they should just create GLang

[ynp7]

Your ideas intrigue me and I'd very much like to subscribe to your newsletter. Does this "Everything" you speak of being free include other meals (such as Brunch, the Holy Grail of meals), or is it limited to the mid-day repast only?

Re:they should just create GLang

[Digital Vomit]

Everything should be free, of course. Software, hosting, lunch. Everything.

No, only one of those things should be free: the one that is infinitely reproducible at no cost/time/effort.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand, the App Engine kit includes a server to test your apps. Couldn't you build one yourself if needed?

Re:they should just create GLang

[SanityInAnarchy]

then raise prices significantly.

That's debatable. The pricing model changed, and it's likely more expensive, but also clearer and potentially cheaper.

Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning.

Disclaimer: I contribute to dm-appengine, a DataMapper (for Ruby) layer for Google App Engine. It's part of why people can run Ruby on Rails on JRuby on App Engine.

But I think dm-appengine alone makes a compelling case that you don't have to code from the beginning unless you've done something fantastically stupid. DataMapper has backends in everything from sqlite to Oracle, from RDF to IMAP. It's entirely possible to develop an app which targets both MySQL and App Engine. You'll probably have some porting work, but it's hardly a "code everything from the beginning" situation.

If you developed for Python or Java, there's appscale, and I'm not sure that's the only alternative. You could port your entire app as-is from App Engine to Amazon EC2, or to your own private Eucalyptus infrastructure.

Also, note that Google has made no aggressive moves against these organizations. I don't just mean lawsuits; they haven't even been passively-aggressively mentioning "We might maybe sort of have some patents on that App Engine stuff."

You might have a point here:

So much for Google's openness.

But Google never was completely open source all the time. I can't download the source to Google Docs -- or, for that matter, Google Search -- and launch my own competing service. I have a much bigger problem with lock-in, but it looks like they aren't doing that here.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Joe Tie.]

I'd say getting .net code running in mono is usually fairly similar to getting google app engine python code running in django.

Re:they should just create GLang

[mjtaylor24601]

Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning.

WTF are you talking about? According to the documentation

"App Engine uses the Java Servlet standard for web applications. You provide your app's servlet classes, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), static files and data files, along with the deployment descriptor (the web.xml file) and other configuration files, in a standard WAR directory structure. App Engine serves requests by invoking servlets according to the deployment descriptor."

"Apps can use the App Engine datastore for reliable, scalable persistent storage of data. The datastore supports two standard Java interfaces: Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.3 and Java Persistence API (JPA) 1.0. These interfaces are implemented using DataNucleus Access Platform, the open source implementation of these standards."

Granted not all features of JDO or JPA are fully supported and there are other services such as URLFetch that you can choose to use which won't be portable, but if you have even half a brain when designing your application you'll hardly have to "code it again from the beginning" if you want to move to a different host.

Re:they should just create GLang

[Anonymous Coward]

So lunch then.

Re:they should just create GLang

[NeutronCowboy]

Oh look, I have a mod stalker. I guess I finally pissed someone off enough to waste his mod points.

Re:they should just create GLang

[tehcyder]

You're the one that sounds like a Google shill, if anything.

So now I suppose you'll say that I'm saying this as a paid Microsoft/Apple/Oracle/whatever shill, as it is clearly a logical impossibility to criticise Google unless you're being paid large amounts of money to do so by a rival?

Re:they should just create GLang

[tehcyder]

Oh look, another recent user who consistently bashes Google for not being "open", and praises Microsoft. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the recent obvious shills who appeared on Slashdot?

No, OP said that Google were as bad as Microsoft in going for an "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy. That's hardly praising Microsoft and if he's a Microsoft shill he's a fucking rubbish one.

Re:they should just create GLang

[WNight]

The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google invented AppEngine, Microsoft would be trying to extend someone else's existing project.

Also Google has published the API openly and supports third-party attempts to implement it like this project. Microsoft would have released the API details under NDA to registered developers, and would sue anyone attempting to reverse-engineer them.

Re:they should just create GLang

[maraist]

Have you ever written to a SOA before? It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world to abstract.. It takes like 20 lines of Java code to swap one data-store for another (and I'm talking flat-binary-file, flat-XML-fle, flat-CSV-file, sqlite, hsqldb, mysql, postgres, oracle, NoSQL vendor A,B,C).. It's called coding to abstraction layers.. And guess what, there are already tools that abstract all the major java vendors (elastic bean-stalk, app-engine, etc).

Re:they should just create GLang

[Improv]

Once you've made significant code, major backend changes become a large hassle. This is effectively lock-in; it never has historically meant that your entire company and all of their developers are bound for life to the platform, but rather that somebody owns the APIs and that unless you're willing to jump through a lot of hoops, you sold yourself into bondage once you signed on.

It is better for the software community to demand open standards with free implementations so much as is possible. If the AppEngine backend really is something you can only get from Google, and then at a price, it's a poor choice.

Yikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully it will be less horrible syntaxwise than Go.

Re:Yikes

[JonySuede]

at least Go has a better syntax than Haskell ;)

Re:Yikes

[ZankerH]

Haskell has syntax?

Re:Yikes

[TheRaven64]

What's wrong with Go's syntax? Aside from forcing a brace style on you, it's pretty clean and consistent.

Re:Yikes

[Anonymous Coward]

And the water in a public toilet is like the water in an evian bottle, aside the turds.

Yes, their preferred format is a big, festering turd, with the only "benefit" that semicolons are optional, which wasn't a problem to begin with.

Re:Yikes

[shutdown -p now]

> haskell `has` syntax

FTFY

Re:Yikes

[shutdown -p now]

Every time I look at the inside-out array declaration in Go, I feel like gouging my eyes out.

Yes, I understand that it some way it's better than C, in that at least the modifiers are applied to the type in consistent right-to-left order, while still retaining declaration/use correspondence. But C declaration syntax is a clusterfuck to begin with, so it's not exactly an achievement.

I'd much prefer writing types left-to-right - as in int[5]*[10] reading "array of 10 pointers to arrays of 5 ints", and for 2D arrays you can just make syntactic sugar to retain correspondence - e.g. int[10,5] desugaring into int[5][10] - "array of 10 arrays of 5 ints".

-yawn-

[Aladrin]

Until I actually get my hands on the language, no amount of hype is going to do anything for me.

Besides which, CoffeeScript has got to be stealing their thunder. I have to wonder if they aren't regretting developing Dart yet.

Re:-yawn-

[North Korea]

CoffeeScript has a better probability in succeeding too. No one in their sane minds would start using some test project from Google after all the canceled and abandoned projects. At least JavaScript has actual support and standards behind it, and it's widely supported. Google will probably just kill off this project a little after you've spent good amount of time learning and getting used to it and implementing it in your projects. With JavaScript (and CoffeeScript) you won't just some day come to slashdot and see Google's announcement how they've decided to discontinue the project to spend time on something better and newer.

Re:-yawn-

[NeutronCowboy]

Yeah, no one is ever going to deprecate Javascript. I mean, Cobol is still the way we interact with Mainframes, right? Stupid shills.

Re:-yawn-

[El_Muerte_TDS]

CoffeeScript is also fundamentally flawed by putting semantics into unprintable characters.

Re:-yawn-

[interval1066]

So really, javascript, which is a huge security concern for everyone will not go away any time soon because of apathy. At least that's what *I'm* taking away from this thread...

Re:-yawn-

[Anonymous Coward]

CoffeeScript is just syntactic sugar. How does it help fix the fundamental performance problems with ECMAScript?

Re:-yawn-

[ultranova]

So really, javascript, which is a huge security concern for everyone will not go away any time soon because of apathy.

Anything that replaces Javascript will also be a security concern, because it must include at least as much functionality.

Re:-yawn-

[interval1066]

Functionality doesn't == same security risk. Or as many. Might introduce more. I don't believe it necessarily means "as many" however. And certainly a replacement client side scripting language implementer should look into minimizing those risks.

Re:-yawn-

[mortonda]

Tell that to python. It seems to have maintained a pretty good success with that. (for the record, I don't like python)

Re:-yawn-

[Anonymous Coward]

What Google should be doing with Chrome is enabling pluggable interpreters for client-side scripting. JavaScript's popularity is due entirely to the fact that you can't use anything else in the browser. But other languages would work fine if they were allowed to run there. So long as a language has a DOM interface, it should be possible to sandbox the interpreter and allow web developers to write code in that language.

Sure, it may be a lot of work to get this accomplished, but so is creating a new language. But it would end up being less work in the long run because you wouldn't have to spend the effort to keep improving the language and adding modern language features to it after the initial work. Why not leverage all the effort that goes into python, ruby, java and other languages by just enabling them in the browser? A lot of that effort even comes from Google itself.

Re:-yawn-

[slim]

Surely a space is the *easiest* character to print.

Re:-yawn-

[larry bagina]

Perhaps you can list some javascript-specific security problems that would magically disappear if it was some other turing-complete language running in the same sandbox with the same DOM, same cookies, same XMLHttpRequest, etc.

Re:-yawn-

[interval1066]

Perhaps you can list some that will remain even if developers muse on how they might improve web scripting in general? Perhaps you can give developers the world over a list of problems you think they shouldn't even bother with because NOTHING WILL CHANGE NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO. Or so you have decreed.

Re:-yawn-

[Zancarius]

CoffeeScript is just syntactic sugar. How does it help fix the fundamental performance problems with ECMAScript?

CoffeeScript doesn't pretend to address the performance problems with ECMAScript. In fact, it can't, because the CoffeeScript interpreter is just a translator that converts CoffeeScript into equivalent JavaScript. The only things that it addresses are those which make JavaScript's syntax somewhat awkward, and I think it does a fairly respectable job toward that goal.

Re:-yawn-

[flonker]

I think the argument they were making is that the javascript security concerns are largely due to the nature of the "untrusted code in a sandbox" model, and the particulars of that sandbox (HTML DOM, cookies, XMLHttpRequest).

Further they asked precisely what you're asking. How can you improve web scripting without throwing out modern browser design? Only they asked in more detail. What security concerns can be addressed without discarding modern browser principles? They are not simple nay-sayers saying it can't be done. They are experts in the field saying it doesn't seem possible, this is why.

My answer is, maybe they are planning to throw it all away, and are building a platform to migrate to. They have a browser with significant market share. They have the initiative and power to change the web scripting model to something a little less hacked together, even if they have to significantly change HTML itself to do it. Of course that's all a wild-assed guess. Maybe they just don't like semicolons.

Google: call it Hype

[kikito]

Until I see some sample code, that's the name I'll give it.

It isn't really interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

that Google is taking part in this abandonment. ECMAScript 4 will never be passed. The effort has long since been abandoned because the proposed changes were thought to be too complex, according to Doug Crockford.

The changes proposed in ES4 were ultimately abandoned as a group. Even if they're reintegrated over time it'll probably take far too long for Google to be happy with the adjustments to the "fundamental problems" they cited.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[bluefoxlucid]

Let's skip the ass dance and hear what these fundamental problems are, and how to solve them.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[kill-1]

The "fundamental" problem from Google's perspective is Javascript's lack of typing. They want a language with optional typing and think that the ECMAScript 4 route isn't viable.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[Millennium]

The usual: people whining about the language not conforming to their favorite paradigms.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[mmcuh]

Why are they inventing a new language if all they want is typing? Just use C, compile it to bytecode and run it in a sandbox. It has the added advantage that every programmer on earth already knows it (no, someone who doesn't know C is not a programmer).

Re:It isn't really interesting

[Glock27]

Right, because we all know C is the be-all and end-all of programming languages.

Oh wait, it's not. In fact, it's a fairly archaic, cruft-ridden effort at "portable assembler", with not too much to offer in terms of a standard library.

I really think we can do better in the search for an improved browser-based programming language. We've learned quite a bit in the forty years since C was invented.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[jrbrtsn]

You're absolutely right! That's why we now have C99 ;-)

Re:It isn't really interesting

[dzfoo]

(no, someone who doesn't know C is not a programmer)

I thought real programmers use Assembly... or was it Fortran?

          -dZ.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[dzfoo]

We've learned quite a bit in the forty years since C was invented.

Yes, we've learned to enough to come up with JavaScript and VisualBasic.

          -dZ.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

(no, someone who doesn't know C is not a programmer).

And if they knew Lisp, Fortran or Cobol instead, they still wouldn't be a programmer? Seriously, C in a browser? Why not just man up and use High Level Assembly? Talk about hammer, nail.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[Vintermann]

Look up Google Native Client. They tried a variant of C in sandbox as well.

What I hope is that Dart has a Hindley-Miller type system, and some sort of ridiculous type magic guaranteeing safety. Oh, and is simple, neat, and damn efficient.

I'd consider a pony as well.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[M. Baranczak]

Let's skip the ass dance and hear what these fundamental problems are, and how to solve them.

Here's a few:

1. No standard way to import an external script file.
2. No multithreading.
3. Often hard to figure out what the keyword 'this' is referring to.
4. 'null' and 'undefined' are two different values (even though null == undefined evaluates to true!).
5. No namespaces.

How to solve those problems? Use one of the many existing OOP languages that don't suffer from any of them. You'd have to create an API for accessing the DOM from that language, and set up a sandbox within the browser, but at least you'd save yourself the work of creating a whole new language.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[gutnor]

2. No multithreading.

This one is not really a big problem - actually that is a simplification that is probably welcome for a script embedded in a HTML page.
What is bothering is the complete lack of support for the multithreaded environment in which run javascript: no way to wait for an event (except for alert()). Sure you can use callbacks, but then that is the same - there is no tool built-in in the language to deal with the explosion of callback that you get as soon as you get in moderately complicated scripts.

4. 'null' and 'undefined' are two different values

Also undefined is an actual value. You can define a variable with the value undefined, a great source of subtle bugs.

Re:It isn't really interesting

[shutdown -p now]

What I hope is that Dart has a Hindley-Miller type system, and some sort of ridiculous type magic guaranteeing safety. Oh, and is simple, neat, and damn efficient. I'd consider a pony as well.

I might have that pony for you.

Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[eldavojohn]

It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.

Yeah? How many free license programming languages have you released and continued to support?

As a developer, I love to learn a new language. I write a few simple programs in the new language. I explore what advantages and disadvantages that language has and then I put it in my toolbox. If a problem comes along that I must fix, I select the best tool for the job from said toolbox. I don't know how any sane developer could get by any other way -- there is no silver bullet programming language.

The more tools I have at my disposal, the more effective I am. So shut your hole. I don't want people to stop exploring new languages just because it hurts your feelings that the market might fracture and you might have to -- *gasp* -- learn something new!

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

On the internet compatibility is king.

Google have fingers in far too many pies nowadays yet most of there new things seem to die a horrible embarrassing death.

Accepting a new web programming language now from google would just cement google as flailing microsoft wannabe.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has always been about trying lots of experiments. That's cool. 90% of everything is crap, but the successful Google projects are really good.
I've never seen any of their stuff "die a horrible embarrassing death"; they just cull the big failures.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

As a corporate developer, I don't need to learn new languages. I can write a few simple programs in a new language, but my job doesn't require it. If a problem comes along that I must fix, my PHB tells me the best tool for the job from our corporate toolbox. In fact, most times our tools dictate our solutions. I don't know how any sane PHB could get by any other way.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[North Korea]

And that is exactly why it's insanely stupid idea to start relying on something Google makes. For all you know they will just shut it down the next day.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[gbjbaanb]

Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.

The software industry will never become as established and professional until this attitude disappears, we need masters of things, not continual change to something else.

Now, I don't have too much problem with a new language, but the bar for adoption really needs to be set very high to avoid the "change for change's sake" problem I just described. I think js is relatively poor, performance could be a lot better, and there could be a web-client language better geared towards IO, text parsing and GUI development. If this is it, then we'll see - but at the moment, its just hype and vapourware. If you really need something new, go for Google's native client and get that better supported across browsers and platforms.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have another half-assed way of raping the hardware

Nah sugar, its not like that. My software takes your hardware on a smooth journey through vermont's verdant landscape, over covered bridges, skiing in the Alps, before ascending to the heights of Kilimanjaro before leaving this planet in our own space ship destined for planet love. You've got twelve cores,honey and I'll caress each one lovingly as I romance your pci flash.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Superken7]

And Dart sounds to me like saying: people should switch to IPv6 because its much better than IPv4, only IPv4 addresses aren't running out in this case.

Wouldn't it be a huge effort to port all the javascript web to a new language? Look at whats happening with IPv6, and its a much more pressing matter...

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Accepting a new web programming language now from google..

..would be accepting something dumb on the face of it and maybe people are wising up. The very idea of a web programming language is stupid from the get-go.

We so often hear about "domain specific languages" (e.g. from the Ruby guys) and "little languages" (from the old "Programming Pearls" fans) that some people take it to heart and generalize: that a programming language can and should be specific to certain types of applications.

No, a language can be specific, but not a programming language. As soon as your language has things like functions, objects, or maybe even loops (I'm serious!) your language has outgrown the idea of "little" because the applications for your language sure have.

If it's possible, then somebody is going to write a C64 emulator in your awk replacement. That's not just a joke -- look what Fabrice Bellard did with Javascript.

Once you've got variables and loops, you ought to be learning from the decades and decades of experience and making your language a general-purpose programming language, rather than thinking about "web" or anything like that. Every single language intended for the web (e.g. javascript, php) turned out to be a broken atrocity that needed years and years of updating just to get to nominal and unembarrassing.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[smelch]

Well if IPv4 addresses aren't running out, there's no real reason to convert them all over as we can all continue to support IPv4 and IPv6 for as long as we want.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

But he's "learning" something new! He's "effective"! What a fucking buffoon.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Kjella]

The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer. Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.

It's very rarely you need a programming language to do just one thing, maybe they go into specialty or research projects but anything commonly used has to be a swiss army knife. Most of the time you want to ask "Can I add another tool to this knife?" not design an entirely new dedicated knife for that purpose. There's a place to mix products for a "best of breed" solution, but languages are not it. Your narrow choice of language is likely to fail as the project expands and it really needs other sets of functionality.

If you want to see a prime example of that, look at VBA projects that have run out of hand. Quite probably it wasn't such a bad choice for the original task, just tack on this little bit to Excel and it works. Then it grows and grows and all those limitations get very limiting and you're forced to rewrite everything. That's what happens with other narrow languages too, if you go beyond that scope it's very good at things falls apart. Not to mention all the indirect effects like the available employee pool and the complex skills required to take over.

That is why there's a very significant drop-off in languages. I'm not saying you should try making a square peg fit a round hole, but very often the languages you, the team and the company knows and is familiar with beats trying to get everyone up to speed on a new language. But that goes for everything, should you work within the system to improve it or outside the system to overthrow it. I guess it all depends on how broken the old system is but people have a tendency to idealize the system on the drawing board.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Sleepy]

Your comment is so well-written irony that I can not decide if you sincere in what you say, or cleverly trolling for the other side of your argument. When you are arguing for (what seems to be) more languages merely for the sake of more languages, and presenting as evidence how you personally like to dabble in every new language... well, that incites a backlash to your argument.

Google is very interested in bandwidth memory and power conservation. Google apps use a specific subset of Javascript, and they know which bits are inefficient. I would agree that Google should be free to invent a new language if it has benefits. No one gets hurt if the language runs inside JavaScript on other browsers. When it comes to working with open source and standards, Google has credibility and trust... they're not Microsoft, so I do not fear what they do in their labs. I want my phone and laptop both to be more responsive on the web, and use less power.

ECMAScript committee seems much less interested in these things, and are seem to be mostly interested in adapting ECMAScript to be the proverbial kitchen sink. I know they have some device/runtime profile stuff (somewhere), but it does not seem like a real subset standard, and not often used.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Sleepy]

No one has decreed that Dart must exclude Javascript, nor has anyone suggested that IPv6 engineers have been taken away from their pressing task to work on Dart. Your arguments are all false arguments, crafted to support your initial reaction but not really relevant to the issue.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Wave. Google Wave.

Google has done two things very well: Search and Email.

I use their docs solution, and they are great for a browser, but it sucks compared to the desktop variants. The limited formatting alone makes it almost unusable for a lot of tasks, particularly in the spreadsheets.

I'm also using Chrome, which I used to include in their "very well" category, but they have been rapidly adding features that simply do not work well at all (printing dialog), and breaking other things, such as page loads. I have been going to websites recently and I'll regularly have to reload the page just to make it display, which did not used to happen and it does not happen in other browsers.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Khazunga]

Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.

You can't possibly be a top-notch developer. Any good coder out there is just a bit hampered by the use of a new language in a new project. Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax. APIs are more difficult, but then again, the slowness in developing against a new API wears off in a week of work.

Unless some new unknown paradigms are introduced, in the language and/or in the API, it's like dancing the tango to a new tune: You make it up, just like you made it up before.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter what profession you are in, you must constantly be "learning something new" to continue to be valuable.

It doesn't matter if you're a data entry person learning new programs, a truck driver learning new routes, a painter discovering new tools or a programmer learning new languages and techniques. You are always going to fall behind if you stop.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[BitZtream]

Google has credibility and trust... they're not Microsoft

Really? Cause the first thing I thought when I read this story was 'wow, this feels a lot like a Microsoft move I've seen before'.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[gtall]

What you describe, i.e., the dirty snowball effect happening to smaller systems as they get inflated, doesn't necessarily need a narrow programming language for it to occur. It occurs quite frequently in C and even hardware. To be fair, put yourself in a salesman/manager shoes. You have a perspective client, but it is only one. You want to give them what they want but you cannot afford a brand new development to do it. The customer relationship might blossom into big money later but you cannot know that now. So you look over your flock of systems and realize if you were to modify one of them, you could get a shot a satisfying a new customer. So engineering gets told not what to build, but how to build it, thus creating the first layer of the snowball. It is a downward slope from there. It is management's job to understand when the rewards towards a new development will match the cost. However, management has so many incentives to push this point as far into the future as they can. Meanwhile the snowball accumulates more layers.

Then, the snowball falls apart. Management, having failed in their job, will attempt to pass blame onto engineering because no one manager will find it within him/herself to fall on their sword. Relying on engineering to tell them when the snowball has reached unsustainability will not help management because engineering will always see how they can do a better job on any system given a chance to start anew.

This scenario happens over and over because of Business School Product which believes they are selling widgets, any widgets will do, and engineers who cannot be arsed to learn the business side of the business. What is needed are people who can walk both sides of the fence...and those are very hard to find.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[slim]

Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax.

Languages that differ only in syntax are a bit boring.

The Pragmatic Programmer suggests you learn a new language every year. Not to the extent that you're fully proficient in it and know the APIs inside out, but to the extent that you grasp the core concepts. To be worth learning, the language should have new concepts -- but that's pretty common.

Often a little tinkering in a language with some new paradigms, or just a shift in emphasis, can help you improve your programming style in whatever language you use for "real work". For example, a bit of time in Haskell or Closure, will have you using the functional features of Javascript or Ruby more. Playing with Io will clean up the way you think of Javascript prototypes.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Learning new languages teaches you new techniques that you might not be familiar with.

Pretty much every language developed is trying to overcome a shortcoming of the languages before it. By learning the new language you discover the shortcoming of the older language and ways to work around it.

The obvious examples are if you switch programming language families. A procedural language vs an object oriented language vs functional vs logical. No matter which language you use, you can use techniques from other families. The classic example is recursion which is a fundamental part of functional programming. If you know functional programming, recursion is second nature. When you see a problem that lends itself to a recursive solution, you'll recognize it more quickly and be able to implement it in your language of choice.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Threni]

Also, I quite like the idea of a compay which has a reason to create something from scratch to do a job coming up with something which may or may not succeed on its own merits, vs most of the crap which has made web development so tedious (and with such poor results) thanks to `development by committee` and 'death by 1000 standards'.

Get rid of javascript, flash, etc etc, start again with html5 and a new, proper language for doing development on the browser and it's almost worthwhile stopping developing for android, iphone, this os, that os etc.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the jack of all trades and the master of none. The world definitely needs more 'programmers' like you.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[__aajfby9338]

The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer.

If your screwdriver came with a lifetime warranty, then it is a hammer.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me introduce you to the un-announced feature of every new language: Subtle Silent Errors.

Oh, never mind, you know all the pit-falls because before you write production code in them you master each lagu-- oh, wait: You just said you do the OPPOSITE of that.

Well, You'll keep security industry alive. Thanks for the Job Security, man!

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Zancarius]

Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.

The software industry will never become as established and professional until this attitude disappears, we need masters of things, not continual change to something else.

So I suppose doctors, who must occasionally pick up new techniques and new information; teachers, who must occasionally learn new things and take workshops in order to better prepare their students for an ever-changing world; lawyers, who must adapt to new laws; and scientists who occasionally discover something groundbreaking enough to create a fundamental shift in their field are not professionals? This leaves us with historians as the only professionals who can truly master something, because history is not subject to change in most circumstances--oh wait, there's those pesky archaeologists and anthropologists who are continually mucking about with unearthing new discoveries...

All right, then. It appears we have no professionals among the disciplines based on your benchmark. Rather, we've established that every field experiences some degree of change; what we're arguing over is what rate of change is acceptable in order to classify a field as "professional."

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[larry bagina]

As a pillow biter, you love to use a new cock. You have gay sex with the new cock. You explore what advantages and disadvantages that cock has, and then you put it in your address book. When the daily hunger for gay dick comes along, you select the best cock for the job from said address book. You don't know how any turd burglar could get by any other way -- there is no one cock that can satisfy your mouth and your asshole every day.

The more cocks you have at your disposal, the queerer you are. So spread your poop chute. You don't want people to stop exploring new cocks just because it hurts your asshole and you might get AIDS.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Everyone need to shut their hole and make this guys job easier!

But really, get over yourself. If you don't have enough languages in your "toolbox", then go make your own damn language.

And besides, the author was hinting at a suspicion that google is up to something fishy. And I agree.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer.

Have you learned nothing of the Unix way? Don't integrate your systems in an all-in-one software stack, compose them from components. Get your interfaces right and pipe them together. It's not rocket science, its been a standard development practice for decades.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[lennier]

Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.

I agree that this is the situation with programming languages at the moment, but I'm constantly surprised that we continue to tolerate this lack of interoperability. Especially since the entire invention of "component programming" (COM, CORBA et al) was intended to help languages coexist. From my perspective, it's failed utterly to do this.

What I would like to see (and I admit that I'm dreaming) is a huge new shift of focus on the part of language designers:
* AWAY FROM thinking of languages as "something which runs in a single process, perhaps with a VM or runtime, and interacts with an OS and set of libraries"
* TOWARDS languages as "a standardised low-level interface for software components to communicate".

In other words, what I think we're missing with the state of computing at the moment is anything remotely approaching a standard software "signals bus" as in electronics. Generally, at least in the i386 world, we've assumed that a language is a thing which generates binary processor-native code, which calls OS hooks, but otherwise is not standardised in the least. The processor and OS do whatever isolation they can between these opaque lumps of executable binary code, but it's not much. The language runtimes each implement their own, mostly incompatible, ideas about "objects", and some grudgingly export and import something approaching COM/CORBA components, but there's really no way to mix-and-match objects between languages because we're still thinking in terms of large-granular processes running in a shared native-binary host with a shared filesystem.

Ultimately this doesn't seem like it will scale at all well to a system like the Internet. What it would be good to have would be a standardised, fine-grained way for software objects (for some standard definition of object, which doesn't really exist) to communicate safely... which is what COM/CORBA attempted and failed to do, and which the Web/SOAP/AJAX/Javascript seems to be trying to reimplement, fairly badly, at a much higher level.

tldr: I'd like to see an object-oriented language or meta-language which really adopted the idea of "object" as the sole organising principle, throwing away entirely any kind of executable package larger than an object, and allowed those objects to be scattered across the Internet or grouped inside a single process, and then optimised the communication for those differing scales without the programmer needing to know. Then each object could be implemented in a different language, and it would all still work.

The problem is each OO language has its own idea on even such fundamental principles as what an object is, what a method is, how inheritance works, and so on that it's not clear there could be any standard way of allowing diverse objects to connect. But I think it's where we need to get.

Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Can some explain why this comment was rated insightful when it had absolutely nothing to do with the topic, and more specifically the highlighted comment the poster himself included? This reminds me of a political debate, or a journalist, who says "You are telling me you are going to take away my guns". Uh, no. Yeah, yeah, we all know new languages are great. Blah blah, coffeescript, jquery, Rails, all good things moving us forward.
    Now - can anyone answer the point from the editorial - Google abandoned EMCAScript 4, but it wants you to use Google branded and approved Dart. Please people, there are always reasons, let's not be so so naive. Call me suspicious, but I prefer open-source tools that are from the grass roots, not designed by a committee, from the goodness of their hearts, at a giant conglomerate like Google.

Lua would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

Lua is very Javascript-like already except it's very small, simple, clean, and fast. Much faster; LuaJIT is incredible.

Re:Lua would be better

[kripkenstein]

Lua is very Javascript-like already except it's very small, simple, clean, and fast. Much faster; LuaJIT is incredible.

LuaJIT is not much faster anymore.

LuaJIT gets to about 2-3X slower than the fastest gcc, while the latest JS engines (V8 with CrankShaft, SpiderMonkey with TypeInference) get to 3-5X slower than gcc. That's still a significant difference, but the JavaScript engines are also improving faster. In a year or so the difference will have vanished.

Those numbers are also a little misleading. They are mainly simple benchmarks, where LuaJIT's tracer is phenomenal. But if you take a complete program, with a lot of use of classes/inheritance/closures/etc., LuaJIT won't do as well - it hasn't been tuned for those things. In other words, on real-world code the difference would be nonexistent or even reversed. But what is representative 'real-world code' is debatable so it's hard to come up with numbers for that. (But you will often see it in practice in the field.)

Re:Lua would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

LuaJIT isn't much faster than V8 anymore, and if you go through the huge pain in the ass of making a lot of the Lua benchmarks handle Unicode properly it suddenly becomes much, much slower...

Re:Lua would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like LuaJIT is getting any slower. It'll improve, too.

The real issue, and the one probably behind Dart, is that Javascript has certain issues in the language semantics which cause headaches for optimization. Some of these headaches don't exist with Lua. LuaJIT could probably always remain faster than a Javascript VM of the same caliber.

And when JS suddenly seems viable

[slim]

It's interesting that this should come about when Javascript seems (to me) to be undergoing quite a surge.

The community has carved out a set of practices that makes Javascript pretty satisfying to work in -- Crockford's efforts, the require/export conventions etc.

Callback oriented programming habits learned in the browser with jQuery (etc.) have shown that Javascript lends itself quite well to that style of programming. Underscore has promoted a functional style.

Node.js seems to be more popular than forebears such as Twisted, presumably because of all those JS-in-the-browser programmers who can apply their callback habits to Node.

CoffeeScript is there for people who want a more expressive syntax. ... and just as people are coming around to the idea that JS isn't that bad after all, Google says "nah, it's irredeemable"

Re:And when JS suddenly seems viable

[Sancho]

Whether or not Google's problems with Javascript are reasonable, it's perfectly understandable that now is the time that they would start caring so much about the future of JS. We're starting to really push the envelope, and when you do that, the shortcomings often rear their ugly heads much more dramatically.

Dart or Dash?

[Eraesr]

So what is it going to be called? Dart or Dash? The email refers to it as Dash while the older articles refer to it as Dart. It's going to be Dash then, I assume, if Google internally refers to it as Dash?

Re:Dart or Dash?

[Anonymous Coward]

um ... we'll find out soon enough? who cares?

Re:Dart or Dash?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dash" is already taken --- the debian replacement for /bin/sh that is mostly compatible with BASH.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[I'm Not There (1956)]

So what is it going to be called? Dart or Dash?

It seems that it used to be called Dash, but was later renamed to Dart.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should've named it Kart.

Then eventually we'd have a new web dev framework created, with Go on the backend and Kart on the front end, and call it Go-Kart.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[camperdave]

So Go-Kart can be run on either Gnome or KDE?

Re:Dart or Dash?

[bigredradio]

How about SHart? See if you play around with the capitalization, it doesn't look so bad.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will call it Dash because it it OBVIOUSLY 20% cooler than javascript.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[larry bagina]

It didn't stop them with go.

Re:Dart or Dash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably "Dart-Dart-Dart Dash-Dash-Dash Dart-Dart-Dart."

Re:Dart or Dash?

[PsyberS]

So what is it going to be called? Dart or Dash?

Dart.

I cite the title of Lars Bak's upcoming talks on the language:

Dart, a new programming language for structured web programming

Designing the Dart programming language with a simple virtual machine in mind

Brightly

[I'm Not There (1956)]

Forgot to mention Brightly in my submitted story! This part is FAQ of the email is interesting:

How does this affect our cloud IDE (Brightly)?

Brightly will enable building any web application in V1 using today’s Javascript plus the additions in Harmony. As soon as it is ready, Brightly will support Dash as well. We expect that the more prescriptive development aspects of Brightly that will come on line in the future will be more Dash focused.

We expect Brightly itself to be the first application written in Dash.

Does Backwards Compatibility Matter?

[OG]

The whole point of the "type" attribute in the script tag is that a browser can support multiple scripting languages. The introduction of Dart wouldn't necessitate dropping JS for the browser, but if other browsers implemented it (or Google created extensions for other browsers), it would provide an alternative.

Re:Does Backwards Compatibility Matter?

[icebraining]

Backwards compatibility is not just browser support, it's also the hundreds of JS libraries that don't exist for Dash/rt. It would be nice if it was designed to be interoperable with existing codebases.

Re:Does Backwards Compatibility Matter?

[OG]

So many libraries exist to help with flaws/lack of functionality in vanilla JS. Perhaps the libraries that come out-of-the-box with Dart get rid of the need for such libraries (though it will probably have its own issues, thus resulting in Dart-specific libraries). And again, the libraries won't suddenly become unusable, as Javascript engines will still exist to utilize them.

Re:Does Backwards Compatibility Matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 (per the current draft) allows only the value "text/javascript" for the type attribute on the script element - anything else is non-conforming.

Anyway, it'd just end up like VBScript - supported on one browser (Chrome, in Google's case), but none of the others.

VBScript had the advantage of a browser family with 95%+ market share, and *still* no-one used it, because Javascript was more compatible by a few measly percent.

Think about that: more browsers had JavaScript unsupported or turned off, than there were non-VBScript browsers, and still everyone chose to use JavaScript. (And, probably, more amateur page designers knew VBScript from Office, than professionals knew JavaScript, at the time.)

Makes sense

[Concern]

Javascript is something of an accidental success. As with many languages before it, its users valiantly cope with its flaws and do their best to dress up the squalor they live in, but it's not funny for Google anymore. They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them. In fact the story of the last few years has been the quiet proving out of the "extra keystrokes for correctness" paradigm, from simple assertions (including "type assertions" aka good old fashioned strong typing) to unit tests to highly complex integration tests of harrowing complexity.

If I understand correctly, Google already writes much of their JavaScript in an intermediate language that adds certain features. They have long needed a compile step anyway for compression/"obfuscation" and I suspect it was a natural outgrowth of that. This appears to be another step in the evolution of that development pipeline.

There are many interesting developments brewing in the browser these days. I wish the browser guys luck, because I think have just a little longer to get their act together before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem. A modern scripting language is only part of the price of admission to staying relevant as a platform.

Re:Makes sense

[dingen]

Javascript is something of an accidental success.

Just like PHP, MySQL, Apache, HTML, Linux, the web or the internet itself for that matter. The technology of the web is a giant happy accident and it's really quite amazing it all seems to work as decent as it does.

I'm not saying this situation is perfect and improving upon it would be bad. I'm just saying Javascript isn't any worse than all the other popular technology that makes the web tick.

Re:Makes sense

[daktari]

before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem

the horror...the horror!

You make a lot of good points though.

Re:Makes sense

[Concern]

It is worse. Quite a bit worse than emerging alternatives. So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it. Google has said so as well, and they know a thing or two about client-side scripting. PHP was originally quite simple in implementation, but it was purpose designed from the very beginning for its primary use to this day - a scripting and template language for dynamic website development. MySQL was directly intended for data storage - which is still all we use it for. Apache - a web server. OK, subversion tried to use it as part of their network layer, and look how that ended. :) Linux - an OS kernel with a Unix heritage. Android and iOS have been cleverly and purposefully designed to be rich client platforms - they already do more than what HTML5 hopes to achieve, and better. Companies are not making mobile web sites - they are making mobile apps, and these platforms are growing quickly enough that "mobile" is going to be a term that dates you after the end of the traditional desktop OS, when these new platforms become so ubiquitous as to erode the distinction.

Javascript and HTML clearly and obviously did not have the current rich client feature set in mind at their creation. That evolved over the many, many years. Worse, Javascript is just not the best scripting language to begin with. Even without being doctrinaire about whether certain kinds of dynamism have stood the test of time as good elements of language design, among similar scripting languages, there are just better alternatives than Netscape's mid-90's little sideline improvisation. The entire first era of Javascript involved implementations so poor, unstable, and limited that they were barely adequate to implement image rollovers. Even the most basic features that led to "Ajax" - anything resembling network IO - came years later and were pioneered by a different team at a different company - Microsoft. And it took even a few more years before anyone had the audacity to use it for i.e. Google Maps - in no small part because of how poor the platform was, and how different it was from the original intent of the creators.

Re:Makes sense

[w_dragon]

All the things you list there have either full standards specifications or high-quality documentation. To me that is the thing missing from javascript.

Re:Makes sense

[slim]

I know it's a bit pedantic to distinguish between the DOM and Javascript, but I think it's important to do so here.

One of the ways "Javascript: The Good Parts" made JS look OK, was to exclude the DOM from the book altogether. Most people seem to agree that the DOM is a bit of a mess.
One of the things that makes jQuery popular is that it wraps the DOM's methods with something altogether more usable and consistent across browsers.

Your image rollovers example, for example, to me seems all about the DOM and little to do with Javascript itself.

XMLHttpRequest ("the most basic feature that led to AJAX") shouldn't be viewed as a language feature; it's an object prototype provided by the browser. (There's no XMLHttpRequest in node.js -- except as a third-party module)

This is important because if Dart uses the old DOM API, then it's inherited one of the worst aspects of what it seeks to replace.
If Google comes up with something new to replace DOM, then it would seem churlish not to provide Javascript bindings to that -- but that would make a whole new language seem superfluous.

Re:Makes sense

[SiMac]

I think this is all patently false. There are some really wonderful things about JavaScript. There were some pretty awful incompatibilities between the DOMs of major browsers, and there were/are some inadequacies in the capabilities afforded to JavaScript. However, none of these are reasons to knock the language itself. You haven't named any flaws in JavaScript as a language, and there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well. Try doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does in Python, or Java, or pretty much any other language. Pretty much every user-facing component of Firefox is built in JavaScript, and it's at least at the level of most other "rich client" applications, but far more extensible. HTML still has some limitations, but Dart won't fix those.

Re:Makes sense

[Concern]

OK, I get it. Javascript is the best client scripting language around, and you know better than Google. And "doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does" is uniquely easier in Javascript. I could give you a free education in the relative merits of Javascript versus language X, Y, or Z, but really, you're starting from too far behind intellectually for a slashdot post to help you. Not to mention, recapping a decade worth of widely known debate in the language design community is a waste of time if you won't believe it from me anyway, right? And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?

Other languages are out there to be explored - you may find them interesting or you may hate them. But if you pick favorites more easily than you pick up new platforms, you could find yourself out in the cold when your favorites become obsolete. I leave you with that - good luck.

Re:Makes sense

[Concern]

These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client features to an already deployed web browser audience, and half accident.

700k+ smartphone OS devices sell in a day. They are already bleeding over into non-mobile form factors. Developers care about two things: what can I do and how easily can I do it? If the browser teams don't get their act together, in a few years the best answers to those questions will not involve Javascript or the DOM if the majority of users see the web browser as just another app they don't use much anymore, because it's slower, uglier, less reliable, and more complicated to use than another app, that they can find in their menu of apps, or install from a marketplace of apps.

WebOS interestingly was an attempt to leapfrog the standards bodies and build a viable platform with Javascript/HTML/CSS. It failed, so it's up to the remaining players now if they want to keep trying.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a "language design community" beyond ivory tower academics working on esoteric type systems and evaluation strategies? I know there are some hobbyists making toy languages here and there, but where are the meeting places for serious non-academic language designers? Or do you count people who evolve existing languages as language designers?

Re:Makes sense

[organgtool]

They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them.

Code to maintain
High on cocaine
Google is ready, time to take heed
Cruft up ahead
Hacks left behind
Google, release something before I lose my mind

Re:Makes sense

[SiMac]

I'm not saying there aren't issues with JavaScript. I'm just saying that it's not a terrible language, and the only arguments you have given against it are red herrings. Whether I am intellectually behind or whether the first JavaScript implementations were terrible are entirely inconsequential.

And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?

The "largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications" are quite possibly Firefox and Thunderbird. The difference is that the intellectually backward Mozilla developers want to see JavaScript evolve, whereas Google wants to toss it entirely and replace it with a new language of their own design.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox and Thunderbird are the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications.

Wow. Did you fall and hit your head or something?

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys must all be talking about a different JavaScript than I use. The one I use is slow as hell to do anything as simple as late 1990s rollovers. I mean I really have to think about how I code everything so it that it doesn't lock up the browser. How on Earth any of this more complicated stuff even runs at all is beyond me.

Re:Makes sense

[SiMac]

Firefox contains 830,748 lines of JavaScript. There's more C and C++ involved, but the same is probably true of Gmail (s/C/Java/). When is the last time you looked in mozilla-central?

Re:Makes sense

[shutdown -p now]

It's true that many people confuse HTML DOM with JS, but there are enough quirks about JS itself that make it rather unattractive. Some of it will be fixed in ES6.

Re:Makes sense

[shutdown -p now]

You haven't named any flaws in JavaScript as a language

This question keeps coming up in every Slashdot story mentioning JS. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of having to re-type it over and over again. I'll just keep linking to this post from now on.

there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well. Try doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does in Python, or Java, or pretty much any other language.

What, you've never used an asynchronous API in other languages? I guess then that you don't know that some of them have a single standardized API that is shared beween all async operations (rather than some ad-hoc, slapped-together design for one very narrow use case). And some even have extensive support for async operations in the language itself.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point. I think even Java would fit there, as I believe it was originally designed to be a language for appliances, and after 15 years, it now actually seems to have reached that original goal through android, for example.
Personally, I'm fine with Google developing their own language, but I prefer Facebook's style. Reaching the limitations of php, they built their own compiler (even though there already was a decent compiler), where as google has the scrap it all and start from scratch.
And certainly, for any language out there, people can say it is "worse", look at Java, or C#. And yet, we smile, and turn back to our work, cranking out applications. Ping me again when this gets out of google "beta", and it's no longer vapor ware, and I'll check it out, maybe. Or not.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it.

We certainly won't since nothing in your post backs up your point. If anything, right now, those using Dart will be "gradually marginalized". It isn't simply the "greatness" of the language that determines success. Look at so many other technologies, there's much more to it than that. I cannot stress this enough. VHS vs. Beta-max. Blu-ray vs. DVD. Why the success of REST vs. SOAP? Why is .NET sorta faltering, with COM having a comeback? The *tremendous* success of verbose Java, which was designed for appliances? I'll give you a secret - it's partially having luck and good timing. And unfortunately for Google, they missed the boat.
So the folks out there that say Javascript is "worse" than PHP for example - find, develop your app in your "perfect" language of choice, Erlang, Haskell, meanwhile the rest of us will be busy cranking out applications and getting work done.

Re:Makes sense

[SnowZero]

I'm fine with Google developing their own language, but I prefer Facebook's style. Reaching the limitations of php, they built their own compiler (even though there already was a decent compiler), where as google has the scrap it all and start from scratch.

Um, V8?

What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[dirtyhippie]

It seems to be taken as a given in this document that Javascript is unusable.... But there is no explanation of why this is the case (except perhaps for google's business needs) - what exactly is the problem with it? Performance is quite good these days thanks in large part to google's chrome folks. Few languages are easier to use, but it is still quite powerful.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[juancn]

There are a few things wrong with it. Which do not matter much for small-ish code bases, but tend to be a pain for larger products. For me most revolve around the interpreted nature and the lack of types.

Off the top of my head:

• Performance: Current javascript engines are as fast as they get for an untyped language. There isn't much more you can do to speed it up. Even optional type annotations would open a large number of potential optimizations.
• Tooling: For large projects, not having much type information is painful. Refactoring code becomes a guessing game (some tools do it better than others).
• Load time: You have to compile javascript each time a page loads. This adds some latency that could be minimized with a proper
• Lack of integral/decimal numbers: This might not seem like much of a problem, but handling money with only floating point numbers is painful. Also, things such as WebGL would benefit from having better ways to deal with raw data.

Don't get me wrong, Javascript is a great little language, but it is by no means perfect.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[juancn]

• Load time: You have to compile javascript each time a page loads. This adds some latency that could be minimized with a proper binary format

Pressed "post" too soon.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with it is that the DOM got a bad rep due to lack of standardisation during the browser wars and fools confuse these problems with javascript itself. That despite being powerful and (as you point out) fast, it doesn't keep a legion of Google staffers (python and Java programmers) employed reinventing the wheel. Microsoft will doubtlessly release their ownlanguage and Apple too. Dash, dart, damp fart... doesn't really matter what google call it.

Someone on here once called javascript the idiot savant of programming languages. It has its flaws but I've grown to like it and certainly prefer it to java, python, ruby and other crap people have variously suggested adding to browsers over the years. For a language with such a haphazard backstory, it's a hell of a lot cleaner than Googles Go.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[ErroneousBee]

Theres a few annoying quirks around the duck typing ( e.g. 01234 gets treated as an octal number, bloody stupid decision)

typeof is useless

The class system is a bit klunky, but I'd far prefer it to something like Java where OO mandatory and you soon end up abstractFactoryFactoryGetter'd up the wazoo.

There is no native include directive.

But most of the problems are with a certain browsers inconsistent use of the DOM, dodgy standards support and bizarre bugs that never get fixed.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd add lack of concurrency support. While Javascript is often used in a heavily event-based environment, there is no language support for actual concurrency and everything is implicitly single-threaded. Existing code heavily relies on the single-threadedness.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Javascript is a language that combines the type-safety of Perl with the object paradigm of pre-ANSI, pre-STL C++, the power and expressiveness of Visual Basic, the ambiguity of HTML, and the readability and maintainability of C.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[slim]

... and node.js makes a virtue of single-threadedness. Maybe that's something to hold onto.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Ruliz Galaxor]

If you calculate money in cents, you only need integers. This is valid for many programming languages by the way and can be applied in almost all situations.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

just to add to the list, use of the prototype object does not lend itself very well to subclassing, which is very problematic when you are trying to develop re-usable code. I find javascript classes get more and more bloated the more times I attempt to re-use them within a project.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Most financial/accouting software needs to handle fractional cents.
2. If you are dealing with multiple currencies, it becomes very difficult to do it using only integers.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[slim]

... until you need to deal with half a cent.

Or apply 1.3% interest to an account balance of $100.34 ...

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[SiMac]

This is false.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_web_workers

Supported by Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome 3+, and IE 10.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[SiMac]

Performance: Current javascript engines are as fast as they get for an untyped language. There isn't much more you can do to speed it up. Even optional type annotations would open a large number of potential optimizations.

Tooling: For large projects, not having much type information is painful. Refactoring code becomes a guessing game (some tools do it better than others).

Then add optional type annotations. You don't need a new language to do it.

Load time: You have to compile javascript each time a page loads. This adds some latency that could be minimized with a proper

JS compilation is very fast. Usually, the time it takes to load the JS is a bigger issue. However, the availability of an intermediate bytecode representation is unrelated to the semantics of the language itself. You could implement this on top of JS without a problem.

Lack of integral/decimal numbers: This might not seem like much of a problem, but handling money with only floating point numbers is painful. Also, things such as WebGL would benefit from having better ways to deal with raw data.

Again, you could add these on top of JS. If the only problem with JS is that it's missing features, the obvious solution is to add those features, not to throw out everything and start from scratch.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web workers are more like processes, but with more limited communication interfaces. You get separate programs, each single-threaded, which can exchange data. This very restrictive concurrency stopgap was necessary precisely because there used to be no threading model at all and existing code doesn't expect to be interrupted.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[juancn]

You can extend it to your hearts content, but you might as well build something different and leave Javascript as is, completely undisturbed. It's a choice they can make.

It is probably faster to take a chance and build an entire new language unilaterally, than gaining consensus with all the players to get the right set of modifications to a well known language (standard committees are a pain in the proverbial arse).

Since they are planning to make their language to be able to cross-compile to Javascript, they reduce the risk of not getting widespread enough adoption (all browsers that support Javascript support it), but since probably WebKit is going to support it natively, they will get a huge installed base without much effort.

It is not such an unreasonable choice they are making.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript is not untyped.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What exactly is wrong with javascript?
Only just about everything. Really, if you have to ask this question, either you've never used JS, or you've never used a real language.

The language was implemented in about ten days flat as the Netscape-Microsoft browser wars really started heating up. The only criterion was "we need something and we need it yesterday".

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[TemporalBeing]

It seems to be taken as a given in this document that Javascript is unusable.... But there is no explanation of why this is the case (except perhaps for google's business needs) - what exactly is the problem with it? Performance is quite good these days thanks in large part to google's chrome folks. Few languages are easier to use, but it is still quite powerful.

While I am not quite as aware of the problems in JS/EcmaScript as Google is, from my own extensive JS coding I can tell you that it is a pain writing JS to work on a multitude of browsers, namely because of how fractured the DOM environment is - especially when you consider supporting Internet Explorer. Getting everyone on a common DOM is itself a big enough challenge - but would very well be worth it. (That is, browser specific DOM should not be relevant to JS writers which should be able to stick to a well known public DOM that is supported by all browsers. Kind of like in Java you have *.java.sun.com is something you don't program to since it may not be there under another JVM.)

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

this

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor point, but 01234 being treated as octal doesn't really have anything to do with duck typing. Both 668 and 01234 are integers and it is the lexical analyzer that is treating them differently. The parser, let alone the typer, would never see the difference.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant the type-safety of TCL and the readability of Perl/APL... nice explanation anyway.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a few that have been mentioned: one worth repeating is that the strange handling of numeric types makes writing efficient or correct computations in Javascript difficult. In fact, generally adding support for static types would make writing efficient code easier, although tracing basically does that at runtime. The syntax is very, very strange (you can omit most of the semicolons in Javascript; good luck figuring out what that means). The semantics of variable bindings are very strange and made stranger by the "with" construct.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although Funny post but the object paradigm part is too much on the false side.

Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript?

[chromatic]

the type-safety of Perl

Perl has better type safety than JavaScript. Compare string concatenation in both languages, for example.

More than one dart needed

[Superken7]

The language can be as great as you want. It doesn't matter if it is not supported by _all_ major browsers out there. Javascript support is probably less broken than CSS support, and you can do something and expect it to work in most browsers, most of the time. It took a long time to get there. The community is starting to build up, even using the language for server-side stuff (node.js).

When introducing a new language, don't just tell me how awesome it is, tell me your long-term plan on how and why most people should be willing to support it, why they should transition to a new language and support two languages at the same time, what is going to happen to the .js web, and why devs should port existing and working stuff to a new language. Sometimes its difficult to "evolve" a single component of a huge system, which will kinda break it, instead of just replacing the whole system, which is by itself quite scary.

Of course, maybe they could use some trickery and have the language compiled to .js (in addition to having its own VM) just so legacy browsers can still load a dart app and run it as js.

But this sounds to me like saying people should switch to IPv6 because its much better than IPv4, only IPv4 addresses aren't running out in this case.

Re:More than one dart needed

[slim]

Of course, maybe they could use some trickery and have the language compiled to .js (in addition to having its own VM) just so legacy browsers can still load a dart app and run it as js.

This is exactly what they are doing.

Google's next canceled project

[anyaristow]

And why should I put in any effort learning about this when they'll probably cancel it?

Re:Google's next canceled project

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there might (possibly) be a way that it provides you with an interesting short or medium-term opportunity to develop a product or advance your understanding, or sheds light on the future of the internet, even as you balance your risk of involvement by using tried and tested solutions and explore other products and research from other sources?

Google: not your parents, or your college, or your government. Just a company.

You: manage your own risk.

Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So Google will "extend" javascript with more capabilities for the supported browsers while other browsers would get a less than optimum solution. Because of the increasing market share of Chrome, all others would be forced to start supporting Dash and perpetually play catch up. If Microsoft did this, (and it has), we all would be shouting E, E & E, (and we have).

Re:Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

[Ruliz Galaxor]

Really? IE supports VBScript, but I can't remember Firefox, Webkit or Opera having support for it.

Re:Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Microsoft did this, (and it has), we all would be shouting E, E & E, (and we have).

Unlike MS, Google does not have a reputation for doing this. For that reason, it would be completely unfair to suspect that is what google is doing. Especially since google claims they want to the language to be open source.

Re:Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source has nothing to do with Open Standards. Google will control the standard.. and if it becomes popular (which it might.. because suddenly google products will work "better" in Chrome) other browser companies will always lag in support because Google will just make changes to the spec without anyone knowing till they release the next version. e.g. .NET -> Moonlight

Re:Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire web standards process has been a continual process of Embrace, Extend, and Hurriedly Adopt Into New Standards Document nowadays.

what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[peter303]

Google has a history of homegrown languages. If few elsewhere in the world dont adopt it, then its not going to prosper.

Re:what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

GO isn't necessarily a java alternative.....it's a good language and Google uses it extensively internally and I doubt they care where its adopted in the world especially if it helps them get their job done better. Language prosperity means nothing if at the end of the day you've accomplished your goals.

"Why are you creating a new language?

Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java. "

Re:what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[SoftwareArtist]

From TFA:

What about Go?
Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go becomes the standard back-end language at Google over the next few years. Dash is focused on client (and eventually Front-end server development). The needs there are different (flexibility vs. stability) and therefore a different programming language is warranted.

Re:what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[UtterCoward]

The very first release of Go happened in 2009. It's only been available for two years. Is it a failure if it hasn't set the world on fire in that short a period of time? C was a brand-new language once, too. By the way, I program in Go every day. It delights me at every turn with its productivity, readability and simplicity. If I have any questions, I can ask Rob Pike himself for advice on the mailing list. Even if nothing ever becomes of it, I have learned cool new things and met brilliant people. It's likely true that can be said of learning most any new programming language, and that's half the point of doing it.

Re:what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go is a compiled language designed to be a better alternative to C++, not Java or Javascript.

Re:what happend to "GO" as java alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript !== Java

need a common language interface

[XiaoK]

Something should be done like .NET CLI. There should be a common language interface for web client scripting languages, and Microsoft, Google etc could each make their own languages so long as they have compatible type systems and compile in to the same byte code. To my mind this would be a huge win for everyone. Why does the web have to be stuck with one crappy scripting language? Also, its sad that Microsoft seems to have abandoned any desire to be a leader. Are they just going to let Google dictate the future of the web?

Re:need a common language interface

[shutdown -p now]

Also, its sad that Microsoft seems to have abandoned any desire to be a leader. Are they just going to let Google dictate the future of the web?

Standard HTML5/JS is not really letting Google dictate the future of the web. Indeed, it's letting no-one do that, since both languages are designed by committee. And I wouldn't exactly expect Dart (or whatever) in IE anytime soon...

Don't panic

[ByteSlicer]

From the horse's mouth:

Why are you killing Javascript?
We are not! Google has a huge interest in keeping the evolution of Javascript on track. In fact, our investment in TC39 (the Javascript standards body) will likely increase somewhat, and we will continue to honestly and whole-heartedly improve the language within the constraints.

Besides, Microsoft will fight this all the way.

YOU'RE KILLING ME, SMALLS!

[idbeholda]

I can't wait to see this in action., but they should stop teasing us and at least release an example of what kind of coding scheme to expect.

Well You're Missing Out, Man

[eldavojohn]

Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.

I don't know what to say other than I feel really sorry for you if you're a developer. I grew up coding C/C++ and had I only had your attitude, I never would have used LISP, PROLOG, Java, Ruby, etc. Could I be some badass C/C++ developer if I had never been "sidetracked" and "not getting things done"? Maybe.

But -- at the risk of being modded down as a shill -- I submit to you a recently launched site I coded with a friend. He did the canvas stuff, I did the backend. I could have picked any solution out there but I ended up going with Ruby on Rails. Is it slow? Yes, compared to C/C++. Is this a super complex site with massive usage? Well, not really. That's what made Rails a great choice. I haven't earned a dime on this project (we decided against ads). But guess how much time I put into making that backend? About 15 hours. I think I spent more time trying to figure out how the host allows me to manage my gems in Rails 3 than I did actual coding. I didn't even reuse a login module from my other sites. Hell, that was all pretty much from scratch aside from Rails 3 and jQuery.

Now, I know how to do this in Java, PHP, C++ and even Clojure. It's essentially a RESTful interface for particular CRUD operations. But could I have done all that in 15 hours if I had selected another technology and framework? I don't think so.

"change for change's sake"

I don't understand where you thought I said I now do all my development in $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_WEEK. There are now more tools in my toolbox. If I pick a different tool next time, I'm going to have a reason for doing it. In the above case, the prototyping time was far less in Rails.

If you really need something new, go for Google's native client and get that better supported across browsers and platforms.

Forgive me if I see this as directly opposed to your opening sentence. Tell me, what makes a new technology "noble" enough for your attention? How do you know NaCl won't flop?

Regardless of how you see it, I with my "rubbish attitude" and "inexperience" and "poor development" and inability to get things done am doing quite well in the job market ...

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[gbjbaanb]

I've learned a fair few languages - which reinforces my point that we don't need loads more. It seems that every week there's a new language (or framework or development paradigm) that's supposed to be a silver bullet. Guess what, they never are. What they do achieve, is to draw you away from getting better at the 'old boring' stuff while you learn how to do the new - and then you ave to spend longer than you think mastering the new anyway.

There are better ways to achieve what you need, by adding functionality to the existing libraries. What you could do in Ruby, you could do in C/C++ given the library support - even stuff like ActiveRecord (which I like loads) is available in a true 'old fashioned' language like C++ and you'd get to keep all your old code, which is a pragmatic bonus when you get paid to deliver products rather than write code.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

He said he Rails was the fastest tool in his box for doing a quick backend. He could have chosen another tool, but it would have taken him longer. What is so hard to understand about that? Ruby is a very good language for prototyping. And Rails is a very good framework for doing the same thing. Does anyone seriously doubt that?

All tools have their strengths and weaknesses. Ruby the language and Rails the framework would be no different. Or are you a True Believer in one particular technology?

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, neat... however, I just discovered a cross site scripting vulnerability... Additionally, you failed to validate a database input.

Oh, you didn't write that part of the stack, eh? You let R+R do it for you... Hmm, well, I guess we'll just leave it up to Rails to fix your vulnerabilities (which I'll not repeat here, because I'm a nice guy).

(Actually, I'm not -- Hint: Even if you're a script kiddie, well, you already have the tools needed to take this one over.
Have Fun!
If you're not a skiddie, maybe you should AT LEAST run a pen-test toolkit across the damn code before making it public?)

With a server named: "thin 1.2.11 codename Bat-Shit Crazy"
WTF do you expect but some one-off insecure bullshit slapped together in a few hours.
YOU are the problem with NOW. GTFO our Networks & Lawns!

Oh what the hell... here's an innocent looking snippet of YOUR CODE, from your server -- BEFORE it's parsed.
Server path name: /home/p4863r40/apps/patternizer/app/views/patterns/show.html.erb
Starting at line 94
[code]
                  </div>
          </div>
          <div class="panel-group" id="metadata">
                  <label>Name: <%= @pattern.title %></label>
                  <label>Owner: <% if @pattern.owner_id == -1 %>
                          ?
                          <% else %>
[/code]
Look familiar?

Shouldn't be seeing any server side code without it being parsed first, eh? Wonder how that happened...

Hell, you didn't even test this AT ALL did you?
Hey, also you might want to check the request file name for "../../", this lets me re-write the request however I want and get a copy of any damn file on the system... but you knew that right? Oh, you did, but R+R is doing that for you -- it's SUPPOSED to know things like that too...

Welcome to the Bot-net.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
Ctrl+F Overlong

Enjoy.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[SanityInAnarchy]

Then elaborate for those of us who are clueless. What is it about Ruby on Rails which automatically implies that anyone choosing it for anything doesn't have a clue?

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the AC posts siblings to the GP herein -- the security flaws. I'm pretty sure this sums it up. Oh, and scaling.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[shutdown -p now]

There are better ways to achieve what you need, by adding functionality to the existing libraries

That's true. Ironically, programming language evolution in the last decade or so has largely been driven by the desire to provide more and better ways to extend libraries (rather than hardcoding syntax and functionality into the language itself). See Scala for a good example of where that can go.

Can you do all that in "old-fashioned" languages? Sure, but you end up writing a lot of boilerplate, because older languages are generally not as well designed for DSLs (excluding Common Lisp, which still remains the undisputed king in that space, and will likely be that forever).

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[formfeed]

Now, I know how to do this in Java, PHP, C++ and even Clojure. It's essentially a RESTful interface for particular CRUD operations. But could I have done all that in 15 hours if I had selected another technology and framework? I don't think so.

Add Perl, some Javascript, and Python if you want to. Not anyone's fault, but why are there half a dozen scripting languages that always can do 2 out of 3 things quite nicely? - Yes, yes, you need them all so you have the right tool when you need it.- But it sounds like the next guy, who decides that the right tool isn't in the box, should think twice about creating yet another new language and write a decent library instead.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

But guess how much time I put into making that backend? About 15 hours. I think I spent more time trying to figure out how the host allows me to manage my gems in Rails 3 than I did actual coding.

Cool site, Dave!

Having said that, I think the "environmental" stuff is only part of the total cost of experimenting with languages on serious projects. Another is the potential for not using best practice for that language because you just don't know enough about it. Reinventing the wheel because you don't have a bag of tricks in that language. I think it's rare that all of those things are outweighed by a language's natural suitability to a given task.

Maybe I'm just apprehensive about having to learn something new from Google with the recent GAE developments.

Re:Well You're Missing Out, Man

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm not seeing any Rails-specific flaws there. If it's the '..' stuff, that really looks like the webserver that's the issue here.

Oh, and it does scale, it just scales horizontally. But maybe you missed the part where this particular site was never intended to scale, and doesn't need to. Or the part where it was done in 15 hours -- that's certainly a reasonable amount of time even if this is only a prototype, so that the entire thing needs to be rewritten from scratch later.

I'm also a bit curious as to why that AC would use this vulnerability to antagonize Rails, rather than submit it to the relevant projects.

It doesn't matter

[optymizer]

All languages are syntactic sugar for the IR code that gets generated. Fundamentally, all compilers translate from a Source language to a Target language (machine language in a lot of cases).

Whether the compiler checks that the types match, that there will be overflow, that you're doing signed vs unsigned comparison - it's up to the compiler and its developers. Clearly, one compiler can have more features than the other one. To access those new features, the compiler needs to see syntactic constructs in the source code. If you can't extend Javascript (or it's not feasible, or you just don't want) to incorporate those syntax changes, you can always develop a new language, such as Dash (or Dart?), with the risk that it will fail, but with the opportunity of fixing the bad things in Javascript and add the features that you want.

This is just a natural way of language evolution (in the broad scope of translating source code to machine code). You can't anticipate all the requirements of the future, so you design a language that solves all previous problems (or a relevant subset) and the current ones. In time, it will become obsolete, as people will build on top of your language to solve the problems they'll face at that point in time.

Obviously, everyone hates change. I say: Give it a shot! At least don't dismiss it till you've looked at it and figured out how it may or may not help you. If it doesn't, stick with what works for you. If it does, hey, you're now better off. Chances are, people aren't wasting their time to develop a new language, unless it solves someone's problem (their problem, your problem, everyone's problem - depends on the goals of that language).

I, for one, always welcome a new programming language, just to see what it brings to the table.

I suppose they threw out Python

[Anonymous Coward]

for obvious reasons:
- it doesn't have an elegant syntax
- it has a poor standard library
- it is not cross platform
- it is not open source
- it cannot be used on both sides of the app (client+server)
- it is not a functional language
- and neither an OO language

Maybe it's not so bad after all. [X]HTML/CSS is so crappy that I'm not sure any Python code would accept to run inside a browser.

Re:I suppose they threw out Python

[larry bagina]

Actually, python is open source (not that it matters to google -- guido is an employee). The other reasons are, of course, quite valid.

Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Google is not evil points:
* Google massively supports open-source software
* Google pushes for open standards rather than lock-in
* Google has fought for the defense of fair use
* Google has fought for net-neutrality
* Google provides free services
* Google is wiling to take a loss on products to provide these free services
* Google allows you to easily export your data from their services, and even fully delete your online data/profiles
* Google is the cloud services provider that doesn't claim to own your data
* Google is running a test in Kansas of gigabit internet for the whole town and another test of free city-wide wifi.
* Google is the only search company to fight censorship in China
* Google is the only search company that refused to hand over user data to the Bush Administration
* Google fought Brazil as well to protect user data
* Google developed an open-source phone platform and has been encouraging handset manufacturers to open up and let consumers flash custom roms

Google is evil points:
* The Google Map street view team recorded data on open wifi networks. If people didn't want anyone to know you have a wireless network, you can turn off broadcasting the SSID.
* Google eventually caved/compromised on one portion of net-neutrality. They have a joint proposal with Verizon that would ensure the internet itself is protected by net neutrality, but wireless phone providers would be allowed to provide unique content and services. Is this really all that evil of a compromise?
* Google hasn't released the source code of Honeycomb because they don't want the market diluted with phones with a bad phone stack, but has promised to release the source code of Ice Cream Sandwich when it comes out in October/November. Man, that really is evil!

Seriously, the assumption that Google must be evil just because they are a big corporation is a flawed, simplistic view. I'd rather judge them on their actions. And according to their actions, they are the only major IT company out there I would trust given that my alternatives are Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, etc.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[North Korea]

* Google's business model fundamentally relies on violating peoples privacy and selling users private information.

That is all that needs to be said, even while there's a lot more.

And seriously, you can make that kind of list of any company, even Microsoft. MS does a lot of cool R&D in Microsoft Research, they give out software freely to students, they give out Visual Studio Express freely, they support charities, and they also massively support open source software outside of their core business.

Google does a lot of evil things. You can't kill an innocent little girl and get off of it by saying "but look, I also help homeless people by giving them food!". If you do evil, you do evil, and you should be punished for it, no matter if you do good things as well.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Except that claim is an outright lie.

Google never sells your data. They use your private data to determine which ad to show you. Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, etc. all sell your data. Google doesn't. That is a very important distinction.

And you can't say that Microsoft does all the above. They gladly supported censorship in China. They fight open standards and open source software. They're aggressively suing people over patents. They handed over data on all their users to the Bush Administration. etc, etc.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[North Korea]

How does Facebook or Microsoft sell your data? To begin with, Microsoft always asks you first if they can collect anonymous usage data. Google doesn't even ask.

Secondly, Facebook also uses data the same way that Google does - to show relevant ads. They don't sell that data to anywhere. Hell, it's their largest asset, they would be insane to do stuff like that.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[The Moof]

A lot of your "not evil" points can be offset by the "is evil" point: "Google only does things that are in their business' best interest."

The whole China thing was a hot mess for Google. They caught a lot of heat because they actually complied with the censorship laws of China when opening up shop over there. If I recall, they didn't start being vocal about the censorship until the whole "Chinese government hacked our e-mails" thing. They are still in China, just not their search.

Google didn't make Android. It was a project that they acquired when it was near completion.

And, as someone else pointed out (which goes along with my first point) - Google's entire business model is based around gathering as much information about you and using it for marketing. Some view this as an enormous privacy concern. This is how the cheap/free internet, doing things at a loss, offering free services, etc, is all justified. If you read your EULAs, they spell out that Google is collecting your data and using it for their marketing purposes.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Microsoft has a patent specifically on how to best sell your private data to the highest bidder. I'm trying to find it at the moment, but searching for Microsoft and patents mainly returns results on Novell, Nortel, Android, etc. And why exactly did Microsoft file this patent in conjunction of their purchase of Skype:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/72771.html

And you may want to read these:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-18/social-media/29443159_1_facebook-profiles-status-updates-advertisers
http://mashable.com/2010/05/20/facebook-caught-sending-user-data-to-advertisers/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_sells_your_data.php
http://www.financetechnews.com/how-facebook-sells-your-personal-info-and-gets-away-with-it/

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

They had no choice but to comply with laws, or they wouldn't be allowed to operate in China. But they did their best to circumvent the laws such as redirecting traffic to Hong Kong serves that didn't have to censor results. And any results that were censored flatly said on the page "These search results have been censored." China didn't like that, but it didn't violate the law.

If you're on the internet, people are collecting your data. One company is open about it, and goes to length to protect your private data. That is decidedly not evil. And again, they're the only company that allow you to remove all your data from their services if you ever want to opt-out.

I asked Facebook to delete my account and it never went away. They won't remove your data if you want. Though they reserve the right to delete your data against your wishes how they feel like it, such as deleting all photos that were uploaded via Digikam.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[beelsebob]

Along with the excellent point about their entire business model being built around invading people's privacy, but here's another for the evil list:

* Funding WikiMapia to drive people to edit their closed maps and directly advertising against projects like OpenStreetMap.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[oh_my_080980980]

They had a choice, not to do business with China. That's the part of don't be evil. All businesses have a choice.

It's truly sad you don't recognize point.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Option 1 - Don't have any in roads in China.
Option 2 - Establish in roads in China and try to actively circumvent censorship so that individuals can find information they wouldn't otherwise, and make it clear to them that they are being censored by they government.

It is said that you don't recognize what they were doing, that you call evil.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Not to mention:

Microsoft censored everything and didn't try to work around it at all. They also agreed to let China have full access to Microsoft controlled email.
Yahoo handed over email as well, which led to a journalist going to jail.
RIM hands over messages and email to help put dissidents in jail.

Google doesn't. Which one do you hear getting called evil each day? Why are the others getting a free pass?

Stop letting astroturfers win.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

Invading privacy? That is a bit harsh, right?

Microsoft patents a technology to spy on VOIP calls without telling you while purchasing Skype. Google tells you that they're scraping your data to serve up ads. If you don't use Google services, they never see your private data.

If you can't understand the distinction, then I don't know what to tell you. People demand/expect free services, but don't think seeing ads is a fair trade-off. The markets that Google have entered have all greatly improved thanks to Google being a competitor. They tend to offer free services that trump other company's paid services. If you think merely offering free services in exchange for ads is inherently evil, then why not blast the entire over-the-air TV and radio industries?

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[drb226]

A lot of your "not evil" points can be offset by the "is evil" point: "Google only does things that are in their business' best interest."

So...you're saying capitalism within a competetive market is evil? I'd call it good business.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[AliasMarlowe]

Parent should be +5 informative or +5 insightful...

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Requiem18th]

Definitively not biased at all. Congratulations, you can now become an slashdot editor.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Requiem18th]

I'm sorry he insulted your boyfirend.

(logged in to take the karma burn)

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a "violation" of my privacy if I willingly let Google have my personal information in exchange for useful services they provide.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[tehcyder]

Translation of your post: I am a Google fanboy.

Thanks for sharing that.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[tehcyder]

A lot of your "not evil" points can be offset by the "is evil" point: "Google only does things that are in their business' best interest."

So...you're saying capitalism within a competetive market is evil? I'd call it good business.

A lot of people would indeed say that pure capitalism is evil, in that it places greater importance on making profits than anything else, i.e. it overrides all other questions of ethics..

By this measure, Google are no more evil than any other large multi-national profit-making company, but also no less, but they are hypocritical in pretending otherwise.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[tehcyder]

If you think merely offering free services in exchange for ads is inherently evil, then why not blast the entire over-the-air TV and radio industries?

That's a weak argument as a lot of people would happily categorise the advertising-funded TV and radio industries as being pretty evil too.

Not all of us think that an advertising-based consumerist fairground is the highest pinnacle of human achievement.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[tehcyder]

Definitively not biased at all. Congratulations, you can now become an slashdot editor.

He also needs to demonstate the ability to find non-stories about Apple products too ("iPad saves toddler from drowning" "latest iPhone rumoured to weigh negative two hundred grammes and able to manipulate space time" "current Macbook voted most influential work of art of the 21st Century by Apple Fanboy Monthly" etc).

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google only does things that are in their business' best interest."

I believe every private or public limited company in the entire world only does things that are "in the business' best interest." (where "business" is also interchangeable with "shareholders" in the case of public companies).

It's their fiscal duty to do so.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[beelsebob]

If you think merely offering free services in exchange for ads is inherently evil, then why not blast the entire over-the-air TV and radio industries?

Because it's not the ads that are inherantly evil, it's the data collection that is ;).

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

It would only be evil Google lied about data collection and truly violated your privacy, Google sold your data without asking you, and you didn't get something in exchange for your data.

Google openly admits their business model is based upon showing your relevant ads, which means scraping your data.
Google doesn't sell your ads, though other businesses do.
Google provides you free services in exchange for your data. If you don't like the deal, then don't use Google services.

No one is being violated and this isn't evil. This is just an option for consumers who want to take part. That is not evil.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Enderandrew]

I made a logical argument. You made an ad hominem attack. What does that say?

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[dave87656]

Excellent points. Thanks.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[beelsebob]

It would only be evil Google lied about data collection and truly violated your privacy, Google sold your data without asking you, and you didn't get something in exchange for your data.

So where on google.com does it say "by the way, we're going to store what you search for, which links you click on, etc"?

Google openly admits their business model is based upon showing your relevant ads, which means scraping your data.

Where's that on google.com?

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Anonymous Coward]

that they're eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil little motherfuckers

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[pthisis]

So where on google.com does it say "by the way, we're going to store what you search for, which links you click on, etc"?

Here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ads/ mainly in the "What information does Google use to serve me ads?" section.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Aighearach]

where "business" is also interchangeable with "shareholders"

... or co-op, politburo, non-profit organization...

The difference seems to be in what people think is in their best interests, rather than any flaw in organizational self interest itself.

And if you consider cases like bad CEOs acting against the best interests of the company for personal gain, and causing vast economic consequences, it is precisely the failure to implement organization best interest that causes harm to self and community.

Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims

[Aighearach]

You've got some Santorum stuck in your teeth. Just thought you should know.

And given Google's tendency to throw away...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

projects when they get bored, tell me again why I would invest > zero seconds of my precious time on this?

Re:And given Google's tendency to throw away...

[jrbrtsn]

The same could be said of Microsoft and Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier, and look how many people invested their time.

Re:And given Google's tendency to throw away...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Actually, it's having been burned by that very thing that makes me no longer trust companies that can afford to fuck over their developer base without consequence. De facto standards like Java and Javascript, despite their flaws, aren't going to disappear because a marketing VP at Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. wants to get his bonus this year by cutting support for [insert programming language or standard here].

We are Google...

[bolthole]

and we are.. "The knights who say NIH!!!"
(Not Invented Here)
as far as rejecting ECMAscript 4

Doing same as M$?

[hesaigo999ca]

When ooxml came out, M$ was wanting to come out with their own version, could this be the same thing here, where they want to have more control and be the more prominent company out there to follow for these new standards

Darth

[a_hanso]

It will kill JDI.

VM exploit in 3...2...1...

[kmoser]

How long until holes are found in the VM that let these apps break out of the VM sandbox?

War on Greasemonkey

[dugeen]

This is about one thing and one thing only, compiled/encrypted scripts so that users don't know what Google is downloading on their behalf and can't control their web experience.