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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.'"
Great... more single-core-hogging fun ahead...
Is the word "platform" officially over? My fucking toaster is a bread-browning platform.
Breakfast served all day!
Why don't browsers come with a generic scripting engine (in addition to, or replacing, the JavaScript virtual machine) that runs some sort of intermediate language a la .NET CIL, or LLVM IR, etc.?
Then we could use pretty much any scripting language we wanted with the content.
Why do the worst technologies that are just barely able to solve the problem always make it? Is the developer community collectively really this stupid? I fear it is...
Because technologies that just barely solve a problem allow people who can just barely do the job to barely solve the problem. People that can barely do the job are less expensive than people who do the job right. Unfortunate enough people are willing to live with "just barely".
I just started on a web project that is heavily javascript (even though it's an ASP.Net app). It feels like I stepped back in time 10 years. I'd have code not execute. Why? Some error somewhere in the code that was ignored. I had a typo on a property set somewhere else. No error. Why? Because javascript created a new property with the typo and set *that*. And every change requires me to run the app to see if it works, because I don't have a compiler to check the basics out ahead of time. And then, because I'm debugging an app in one window, when I'd open a new one to read the news, I'd hit other, non-ignored errors on those pages (advertisements) because 90% of commercial pages these days have error-laden javascript because people rarely check for error conditions. Horrible language.
In my 35 years of professional programming, getting good at dozens of languages, I've only run across 2 I've actively disliked. Javascript is one of them (tcl was the other). JS is a crap language that IMHO can't be fixed. If they ever add an honest garbage collector to the base language then most programs will delete themselves upon execution.
Arguably, it should have been Python, which is a better language. But Python has a problem. Python's little tin god, Guido von Rossum, is in love with his own implementation, CPython. CPython is a naive interpreter. (A "naive interpreter" is one which does the specified operations in the specified order, with little optimization across operations.) In CPython, everything is a dictionary and a lot of time is spent doing lookups. This allows everything to be dynamic. In Python, one thread can patch objects in another thread while both are running. Objects can gain or lose elements on the fly. Even running code can be "monkey-patched".
The price paid for that excessive dynamism is that a Python compiler is hard to write, and an optimizing Python compiler can't optiimize much. Google tried in-house to make Python faster, and their "Unladed Swallow" failed humililatingly. (A different group at Google then developed Go, aimed at the same problem of producing something good for server-side processing.) The PyPy crowd has tried, hard, to make an optimizing Python compiler, and with an incredible amount of complexity under the hood, has made considerable progress, but not enough that PyPy is used much in production.
Pascal went down for a similar reason. Wirth was in love with his elegant recursive-descent compiler. But it didn't optimize, couldn't handle separate compilation, and had no way to handle errors other than aborting. Python seems to be headed for similar irrelevance. It hasn't even been able to replace Perl, which ought to be as marginal as "awk" by now.
Read the essay "Worse is better" and you might understand more about what causes this
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.
They don't always make it: Many do not make it at all. Survivor bias and all that.
JavaScript thrived because the alternatives were arguably far worse. Java applets were terrible. ActiveX a platform specific disaster. Flash is heavy. JavaScript allowed you to do the very minor things most web developers wanted at the time without having to turn your website into a plugin that disregarded base web technologies.
Yes, the language design is pretty silly. The function declaration syntax is silly. It tries to look like a member of the Algol tree, but its internals behave more like Lisp. The automatic type conversion system is the source of many jokes. But it still beat it competition at the time, because it was built into the browser, it talked directly to the page's DOM, and the competition did not. Today we'd have little trouble designing a better language than JavaScript for what we currently do with it, but our best bet to get something like that working is to build a language that compiles to JavaScript and then hoping browsers start building VMs for that language directly, skipping the JavaScript step. Still, not bloody likely.
My beef with JS is that it is a regression from the time of PASCAL or Ada (or should I say ALGOL ?) where good programs are nicely structured by means of proper data structures.
This means:
1.) Reliability is unecessarily low. You never know how many feet an object in variable "monkey" might have. Usually two and sometimes just one, zero or 312.
2.) Security: A lack of type-safety regularly results in insecure programs. Plus, it is quite difficult to reason about program safety in absence of strong typing.
3.) Hard to optimize: Strongly typed languages result in programs which can be quite easily optimized for execution efficiency. Compare that to JS, where the optimizer has to "infer" "typical runtime type" and then optimize for that "dynamic" type constellation. Of course, exception code must handle the "differently typed corner cases", too.
That implies: Bloated optimizer/JIT compiler plus all the nice zero-day exploits which result from this. Donning my tinfoil hat I would say JS is a godsend for the TLAs.
In summary: JS is a regression from the state of the art of 1970s. "IT" is actually forgetting the great achievements in Software Engineering that resulted in Algol. With JavaScript, computing has gone even further down the path of sloppiness and anti-reliability. Let's face it: 99% of people are in this profession for the love of money, not for the love of constructing reliable and correct systems.
Dipl.-Ing.(BA) Informationstechnik Frank Gerlach
Gäufelden
Germany
As a counter-concept, look at this invention of mine:http://sourceforge.net/p/sappeurcompiler/code-0/HEAD/tree/trunk/doc/manual.pdf?format=raw
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because it's easy to mistake one's personal biases for sound judgment about what is "good".
I won't sit here and defend every design decision in javascript, but it's a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. I think of it more like Lisp than Java; it encourages (among skilled programmers) a functional programming style, which turns out to be both under-used as a programming paradigm and very nicely fitted to the kind of event-driven tasks people use javascript for.
If you aren't writing higher order functions in javascript (functions that take functions as values or return them as values) you aren't fluent in javascript and aren't qualified to pass judgment on it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As someone who actually has 2 decades in the industry you don't sound like someone with that kind of time at all. Us middle aged folks look at NoSQL and think "Network database" or CODASYL databases are coming back. We weren't attached to Java-EJBs and expected a lighter weight version, Ruby seems like a scripting language...
Stop trying to pretend to be older. Older people saw shit when you were young that isn't used anymore and that's hard to fake.
Yes, and thank you for dropping my laptop's battery life from 5 hours to 2 hours.
Tell me, do you work at Gawker?
"We would truly be better off without JavaScript, without NoSQL, without Ruby on Rails, and without the hipsters."
It's all very well and good to have opinions, but you make some strong specific complaints here without actually giving reasons for those opinions. Many people disagree with you.
What is your problem with JavaScript? JavaScript DOES, in fact, have some very serious problems. For a classic example that was linked to here just yesterday, try
[5, 10, 1].sort();
I happen to share your dislike for JavaScript, but I can give actual reasons for having that opinion.
NoSQL has its problems as well. While for some narrow uses it does offer great performance, if you step outside those narrow bounds even a little bit, you are forced to code many of the functions normally handled by a relational database, manually. I have never had to implement a huge distributed high-performance database, so in my case the NoSQL use-case is limited to very simple local non-relational data stores. But again, I can articulate a reason for not caring for it: the theoretical basis for it is weak, what actually constitute proper use-cases for it are rare, and it creates a lot of manual coding that relational databases handle on their own.
But now we come to Ruby and Rails (which are 2 different things). Yes, Ruby is a dynamic language, with all the (well-known) shortcomings of dynamic languages. But other than that, what do you have against them? Please be specific. We already know you don't like them. The question is: why?
I started back in 1978 and I remember someone coming in to pitch a database technology in 2006 for which they had patents pending and it would replace relational databases. They kept describing it using catch phrases and turning rows into columns and I just couldn't grasp WTF they were talking about. I finally asked them to draw a picture and they mapped it out on the white board.
I then asked if they had ever read about IMS and hierarchical databases. They had not. I wished them good luck on their patents and sent them packing.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.