The JavaScript Juggernaut Rolls On

JThaddeus writes "An article in TechWorld Australia summarizes the latest opinions on JavaScript from ThoughtWorks: 'There is no end in sight to the rise of JavaScript... "I think JavaScript has been seen as a serious language for the last two or three years; I think now increasingly we're seeing JavaScript as a platform," said Sam Newman, ThoughtWorks' Global Innovation Lead.' The article touches on new additions to JavaScript tools, techniques, and languages built on JavaScript. As the fuller report (PDF) says, 'The ecosystem around JavaScript as a serious application platform continues to evolve. Many interesting new tools for testing, building, and managing dependencies in both server- and client-side JavaScript applications have emerged recently.'"

Comments

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

Great... more single-core-hogging fun ahead...

Re:How about a generic scripting engine?

[tepples]

The last time that was tried, it was called Java applets, and Oracle's incompetence at keeping its virtual machine secure led to browsers blocking Java applets by default.

Load fast, or user will click Back

[tepples]

Why are some developers obsessed with performance? The user probably isn't. They don't care whether something loads 2 seconds quicker

I thought loading faster was the difference between the user staying on a document and the user hitting the Back button to return to someone else's document. Web search engines have recognized this and have started to penalize slow-loading documents.

Javascript is paradigm-free

[mark-t]

One thing I personally like about Javascript is that it covers all three of the currently most popular programming paradigms.

You want an imperative style of development? Javascript can do that, check.

You want an object-oriented style of development? Javascript can do that, check.

You want a functional style of development? Javascript can do that too, check.

Some would argue that by covering so many different paradigms, it ends up covering none of them as well as languages that are designed for a specific paradigm from the ground up, and I wouldn't really refute this point... but it easily does all three of them well enough to still be profoundly productive when developing in any of them, and this means that a programmer is relatively free to pick the paradigm that best models the original problem when designing a solution. This, in my experience, results in shorter development cycles, and frequently much less buggy code.

Re:Web Workers

[hairyfeet]

I'll get hate from the programmers but fuck it, truth is truth. Wanna know what is wrong with JavaScript? The entire damned concept, that is what!

I mean think about it, if I told you "I have an idea! Just to get some information you are gonna have to run strange code from over a dozen places, you don't know these places, if they have malware, you have to trust ALL these places or you can't have the information" you'd say that is seriously fucking STUPID, wouldn't you? That is how modern ad driven web works, calling shit from God knows where with zero control or fine grained permissions, its all run by default....STUPID.

What we need is either a new language built from the ground up with the realization that there are seriously nasty people out there trying to fuck your systems up, or JavaScript seriously needs a rewrite with the modern situation in mind. As it is now everybody keeps trying to fix the bullet wounds of failed design with bandaids like sandboxing, low rights mode, but at the end of the day the very concept of clicking on a link and suddenly getting code from a dozen sites you don't know and executing that code? its just a dumb idea.