We are frequently told that government program X helped half a million people. We see something like "this program provided Driver's Ed for half a million high school students. Rarely is that statement measure paired with the cost, say $4 billion, and it replaced history class at school. The cost is reported separately, if at all. Looking at the benefit and the cost together, we can say that $8000 per student is far too high (commercial providers charge $200 per student, and occur after school. )
It's OBVIOUS that this NSA program isn't worth its cost. What's less obvious, perhaps, is that many other programs have a vastly negative net effect. In other words, just because NextNewIdea might do some good doesn't mean it's not a really, really bad idea.
Program Y will get 10,000 more women hired in IT! Sounds great, right? Of course it's not creating new jobs - it's forcing companies to hire women INSTEAD OF hiring 10,000 men - and the $12 billion program cost represents another 2000 people not hired because the money went to this program rather than paying salaries for new positions. Such a program would do something good, and be a very bad idea.
That's essentially the position of Republican Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul.
I mostly agree, except I'd nitpick one bit of wording. "It never did any good". I'm sure it did some good, but no way it was worth it. The cost (in freedom) is too damn high.
Suppose war causes a shortage of water in an area.
Someone had a 10,000 gallon tank already full, and they sell the water at $10 / gallon. They bought the water at $0.01 / gallon, so they are making a 100000% PROFIT.
On the other hand, if someone is buying goods at normal price and selling them at normal price, there's no PROFIT. You don't have PROFITeering without PROFIT. Such a person might be an arms dealer, they might might even be a smuggler, but they wouldn't be a profiteer.
Let me clarify, as the two current posts indicate a misunderstanding. Currently, the law authorizing the snooping is set to expire in June 2015. Under that law, NSA must get court approval or any wiretaps, and those approvals can't last longer than 90 days. The court has been approving "spy on everyone" each 90 days.
Obama asked Congress to renew the law rather than letting it expire in June, but change it in a couple of ways: Make the authorization permanent rather than requiring re-approval every 90 days Add some smokescreen language to say the dragnet isn't allowed under section 215, it has to be done under a different section.
The Senate voted 58-42 to not extend the law as Obama asked, so currently the snooping must stop by June, when the law authorizing it expires.
Only the current 90-day "warrant" expired, renewing that is standard operating procedure. The big deadline is June, when the whole program will have to stop if Congress doesn't re-authorize it.
Democrats in Congress want to move the program around, so they can say they got rid of the section 215 authorization. Republicans have refused to do that, some like Paul want to let the whole thing expire. Others say the Democrat smokescreen plan only makes it harder to perform legitimate national security activities, without actually doing anything good for privacy.
You're absolutely right that Google's plans kicked the other companies into high gear. It made all the difference in the world.
> That's why regulation is absolutely essential for broadband.
Google DID say that the amount of regulation was a major factor in which cities they entered. Did they say they were bringing that huge improvement to the cities with the MOST regulation or the LEAST regulation? What created the local monopolies in the first place, legal franchises granted by regulators?
Let's have a look at at the capital, Austin, which is 11th largest city in the US and the fourth largest in Texas.
There are about eight car manufacturers: Chrysler Ford GM Honda Toyota Nissan VW ?
At least four ISPs offering gigabit-class service and there hundreds of other ISPs. For gigabit, you can choose from: Grande Google fiber Time Warner (300 mbps currently, upgrading) AT&T Uverse
If you don't want gigabit, Earthlink offers 25 Mbps while Exceed, Dish, and Hughes offer satellite at about 15 Mbps. Sprint 4G WiMax is 10+ Mbps.
Just as certain car makers are not well matched to certain consumers, certain internet services are not well matched to certain consumers. Overall, there are ~8 car manufacturers available and 8 major ISPs who own their networks, plus many minor ISPs.
The problem* with Comcast: They have the fiber infrastructure, the ISP service run over that infrastructure, and the video-on-demand service layered on top of that. Since they have all the layers, they can do anti-competitive things.
Tesla: They make the parts (battery mega-factories), the cars, control the distribution, the sales, and the service over the life of the car. When auto manufacturers controlled the whole stack, they did anti-competitive things.
> because business like to point to precedents in other industries to justify actions in their own.
Businesses and PEOPLE. It's the first rule of fairness. "They are allowed to do it, I should be allowed to as well" is often heard, and normally correct. That's not wrong - it's so fundamentally right that it's one of the most-quoted and most important phrases in our supreme law, the Constitution:
nor shall any State... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
* "alleged problem?". Not everyone agrees it's a problem.
Abusing / competing with dealerships is one issue.
There is another issue with vertical integration, and it's been discussed a lot in relation to Comcast having some vertical integration; both producing and distributing content, running the infrastructure and the value-add services on top of that infrastructure. As mentioned elsewhere, dealers make their money via their service department and extras like upgraded stereos and other options. If the manufacturer is the only dealer, that means for some items they are the only service center, and can charge $400 for a radiator cap which should cost $4.
In general, this is another case of every argument we've seen about why it is bad for Comcast to own the fiber, provide the ISP service, have a video service, and deliver the videos over the fiber they control. Same thing - when an automaker (or ISP, or any company) controls the whole stack from top to bottom, they can do things that are not in the interest of consumers.
So the people who wanted more government regulation to protect the little guy from the big bad corporations from Detroit are now Republicans? Okay, if you say so.
> the current rules favor incumbents. The current rules are against progress.
The whole point of these laws is to prevent the big three established automakers from controlling the market and bullying the little guy. Anyone is allowd can sell cars in these states, except for the big bad car companies, so you don't have any 800 pound gorillas bullying the individual dealers.
Dealers are local, so they've been able to successfully lobby state lawmakers to slant the law even against the far-away car companies and toward local dealers. That's ANY local dealers, including local Tesla dealers.
Tesla wants the same thing Ford and GM wanted, a type of monoply known as a vertical integration monoply. A vertical monoply is when one company controls the entire chain from manufacturing major parts (Tesla's battery mega-factories), building the cars, the distribution network, sales, and service. Contrast to a horizontal monopoly, where one company controls all car sales. In the horizontal, they control only one layer, but completely control that layer. In the vertical, they participate in, but do not necessarily control, control all layers.
To combat these vertical monopolies, voters decided in the 1930s and 1940s that the company who manufacturers parts (Tesla), builds the cars (Tesla), and controls wholesale distribution (Tesla) can't also control sales and service. Other companies get to compete to provide the best sales and service. That's the purpose of the law.
Personally, I'm not sure that I need to be protected from this type of vertical monopoly given the strength of Toyota and Honda in the US. If the big three from Detroit don't treat me right, I'll just buy a Toyota.
By "republicans" you mean "Democrats" . Texas didn't have a single. Republican governor between 1876 and 1983. These laws were passed in the late 1930s and early 1940s (first in 1937). So that's right in the middle of the Democrats' hundred-year reign in Texas.
Of course after that, the Republicans took over Texas, the economy boomed, and everyone fleeing California started moving here.
If they are misdemeanors, no problem. Just be honest. Also check your state law, even though they may ask if you've EVER been convicted, records may be unavailable after a certain number of years and the law may allow you to check the "no" box.
If they are felonies, it makes it harder to get hired, but not at all impossible. You'll just need to submit more resumes than you otherwise would. Maybe take a class on resume writing and interviewing, to balance a weakness with some strengths.
Starting your own business may well be an option- but only if you want to run a business. Running an IT related business is a completely different monster from working as an IT employee.
I'm actually looking to hire someone with an IT background right now, for a commission based sales and marketing position. It could earn good money, or not, depending on if you make the sales. Perhaps someone in your position would be interested in giving it a shot.
I'd have you over for dinner, and you'd be welcome to bring your friend from China.
Also, I regularly deal with cyber attacks from China. I know the Chinese government is attacking us and seeking new and better ways to attack us. I know they have. Chinese students and businessmen working for them do intelligence, so while they're welcome to come to dinner, there's no reason to show top secret stuff to anyone from China. The risk each time may be small, just as the risk of not wearing a seatbelt once is small, but if you get in the habit of risking disaster you'll eventually have a disaster. There's no need to; there are plenty of Americans to handle the classified stuff, and that's lower risk. Sorry. Please do stay for tea.
Egypt has the largest navy in the Middle East and Africa, and is the seventh largest in the world. They were the first to successfully deploy missiles against other ships.
I'm not well-versed enough in Python to to an indepth analysis, but I can say that Python appears to be ideally suited for roles that were once done by shell scripts. The Red Hat installer Anaconda seems like a perfect role for Python, with a lot of interaction with external binaries and very little real computation. The focus of JavaScript, the purpose for which it is created, is of course different.
Further, I would say that unlike Perl or C++, a key constraint on the development of JavaScript was time. Technology moved fast in the early days of the web, and having a workable language now was much better than having a great language ten years later. That resulted in some goofiness like pairs of very similar functions that take their arguments in different, apparently random order. You can't change the argument order of strStr in the next version of the language, so some of that silliness remains. Java is the same in this respect, for the same reason. Java more than JavaScript due to it's very short development timeline. Perl, on the other hand, was slowly developed by a linguist. It's terse, but very consistent and logical.
PHP suffers from a related problem - it was designed as a CMS, not a general purpose programming language, and it was written in Perl. The affects of that still linger, with many of the issues being resolved just recently.
So I'd class JavaScript with Java as languages heavily influenced by schedule and business / marketing considerations of their parent companies, rather than designing a language best for users. C, C++, Perl, and even VB6 are more designed for usage as opposed to marketing of the languages themselves.
A liberal editor COULD try to keep his personal beliefs out of it, so the publication doesn't espouse one position or the other. They could, but New Republic has explicitly chosen to avoid objectivity, they TELL US that the magazine is used to advocate certain positions. Consider what their owner and editor-in-chief says the magazine stands for:
"The New Republic is very much against the Bush tax programs, against Bush Social Security 'reform,' against cutting the inheritance tax, for radical health care changes, passionate about Gore-type environmentalism, for a woman's entitlement to an abortion, for gay marriage, for an increase in the minimum wage, for pursuing aggressively alternatives to our present reliance on oil and our present tax preferences for gas-guzzling automobiles. We were against the confirmation of Justice Alito."
â"Martin Peretz, owner and editor-in-chief, The New Republic
Franklin Foer, New Republic editor: the magazine âoeinvented the modern usage of the term liberal, and itâ(TM)s one of our historical legacies and obligations to be involved"
They've also had editors who worked two jobs, working for TNR while also working for the KGB. You don't get much more leftist than having the KGB editing the magazine.
Fox News is conservative, of course. The Fox News Radio tagline is something like "the latest news and conservative perspectives". Similarly, New Republic calls itself a liberal journal. To pretend that either is objective would be silly.
Fox used to have one good show, Hannity and Coomes, co-anchored by a liberal and a conservative who would both acknowledge when the other made a good point.
You've made some good points, and ones directly responsive to my statement this time. That is true, once upon time Java was a serious option on the client side and it did have the hype. So much so that Livescript was renamed JavaScript to take advantage of the Java hype. JavaScript won, against actual competition. Ps I WAS around during that time, and I've written ActiveX controls for use on public web pages. JavaScript beat both ActiveX and Java in the browser.
The PayPal link is interesting as well. I was curious what their reasoning was, given the plethora of server-side languages, why choose one that's very much designed for a very different role in a very different environment, with very different constraints? They said the primary reason was so that there front-end Javascript developers could also author the matching server-side portion. That's interesting and a little surprising to me. Note one subtle distinction that may not be important except in the context of this thread - they did not say - JavaScript was best suited for the role of server-side development, they said that they wanted a particular team to do server-side and that team only knew JavaScript.
It turned out that for PayPal, Javascript did the job just fine for them. So I'll revise my statement:
If all you know is JavaScript, it might be enough to get the job done. If it's client side web browser code, JavaScript is the only workable option because it beat Java in this role. Otherwise, where you have a choice, JavaScript is NORMALLY not the best suited for any role other than client side web page code. Exceptions may exist.
The open letter from the long-time editors who quit says:
> It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalismâ(TM)s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon.
The very people who make the magazine are very clear that their intention has been that it is "liberalism's central journal". Elsewhere you'll see they honestly and clearly state their intention to promote left-wing liberalism. They aren't pretending to be objective, balanced, or factual.
You could have said the same thing with a lot less words had you phrased it as:
No, I can't think of even one application where you'd consider two languages and decide JavaScript was better for that application.
I didn't say JavaScript doesn't have a lot of features. It does have a large mishmash of features. I said it'll almost always be the worst choice, if you have any other option.
> its intended purpose, making it exceptionally well-fit for the web.
It's the ONLY choice for client-side web. As I said twice before, that's the one place nothing is worse or better - because you have no other choice.
> Java
Since neither iOS nor most Android devices run Java applets, that means MOST users today won't run them. A "solution" that won't run at all for most users isn't a solution. You can't say "Java and JavaScript would both work, but JavaScript would be better".
If you're advocating JavaScript as a server-side language, well that's just silly. Learn any language designed for server-side and after you understand it tell me JavaScript is better suited.
> (Other popular criticisms stem from pure, unadulterated, ignorance: The behavior of this, for example.)
If a key component of the language behaves in unintuitive, surprising, and troublesome ways, that's a valid criticism. See "principle of least surprise".
I said it is the best choice for client-side processing on web pages, because it's the only plausible option. Where other options exist, the others are probably better suited to the task.
If you disagree, can you come up with a counterexample, any scenario where you'd consider using something other than JavaScript, but decide JavaScript is better than the alternative? I'm curious what solutions could be worse than JavaScript. As stated in what you quoted, I do mean solutions - things that would work, but not work as well as JavaScript.
Slashdot Mirror
You get the Useless Use of Cat Award
http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/awar...
cat is for conCATenating multiple files.
grep bob phonelist | dial
I mentioned that for one specific reason.
We are frequently told that government program X helped half a million people. We see something like "this program provided Driver's Ed for half a million high school students. Rarely is that statement measure paired with the cost, say $4 billion, and it replaced history class at school. The cost is reported separately, if at all. Looking at the benefit and the cost together, we can say that $8000 per student is far too high (commercial providers charge $200 per student, and occur after school. )
It's OBVIOUS that this NSA program isn't worth its cost. What's less obvious, perhaps, is that many other programs have a vastly negative net effect. In other words, just because NextNewIdea might do some good doesn't mean it's not a really, really bad idea.
Program Y will get 10,000 more women hired in IT! Sounds great, right? Of course it's not creating new jobs - it's forcing companies to hire women INSTEAD OF hiring 10,000 men - and the $12 billion program cost represents another 2000 people not hired because the money went to this program rather than paying salaries for new positions. Such a program would do something good, and be a very bad idea.
That's essentially the position of Republican Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul.
I mostly agree, except I'd nitpick one bit of wording. "It never did any good". I'm sure it did some good, but no way it was worth it. The cost (in freedom) is too damn high.
Suppose war causes a shortage of water in an area.
Someone had a 10,000 gallon tank already full, and they sell the water at $10 / gallon. They bought the water at $0.01 / gallon, so they are making a 100000% PROFIT.
On the other hand, if someone is buying goods at normal price and selling them at normal price, there's no PROFIT. You don't have PROFITeering without PROFIT. Such a person might be an arms dealer, they might might even be a smuggler, but they wouldn't be a profiteer.
Let me clarify, as the two current posts indicate a misunderstanding. Currently, the law authorizing the snooping is set to expire in June 2015. Under that law, NSA must get court approval or any wiretaps, and those approvals can't last longer than 90 days. The court has been approving "spy on everyone" each 90 days.
Obama asked Congress to renew the law rather than letting it expire in June, but change it in a couple of ways:
Make the authorization permanent rather than requiring re-approval every 90 days
Add some smokescreen language to say the dragnet isn't allowed under section 215, it has to be done under a different section.
The Senate voted 58-42 to not extend the law as Obama asked, so currently the snooping must stop by June, when the law authorizing it expires.
Only the current 90-day "warrant" expired, renewing that is standard operating procedure. The big deadline is June, when the whole program will have to stop if Congress doesn't re-authorize it.
Democrats in Congress want to move the program around, so they can say they got rid of the section 215 authorization. Republicans have refused to do that, some like Paul want to let the whole thing expire. Others say the Democrat smokescreen plan only makes it harder to perform legitimate national security activities, without actually doing anything good for privacy.
This article and discussion is about TEXAS law. I'm not quite sure it makes sense to judge TEXAS law by Raleigh, NC.
You're absolutely right that Google's plans kicked the other companies into high gear. It made all the difference in the world.
> That's why regulation is absolutely essential for broadband.
Google DID say that the amount of regulation was a major factor in which cities they entered. Did they say they were bringing that huge improvement to the cities with the MOST regulation or the LEAST regulation? What created the local monopolies in the first place, legal franchises granted by regulators?
Let's have a look at at the capital, Austin, which is 11th largest city in the US and the fourth largest in Texas.
There are about eight car manufacturers:
Chrysler
Ford
GM
Honda
Toyota
Nissan
VW
?
At least four ISPs offering gigabit-class service and there hundreds of other ISPs. For gigabit, you can choose from:
Grande
Google fiber
Time Warner (300 mbps currently, upgrading)
AT&T Uverse
If you don't want gigabit, Earthlink offers 25 Mbps while Exceed, Dish, and Hughes offer satellite at about 15 Mbps. Sprint 4G WiMax is 10+ Mbps.
Just as certain car makers are not well matched to certain consumers, certain internet services are not well matched to certain consumers. Overall, there are ~8 car manufacturers available and 8 major ISPs who own their networks, plus many minor ISPs.
That's very perceptive.
The problem* with Comcast:
They have the fiber infrastructure, the ISP service run over that infrastructure, and the video-on-demand service layered on top of that. Since they have all the layers, they can do anti-competitive things.
Tesla:
They make the parts (battery mega-factories), the cars, control the distribution, the sales, and the service over the life of the car. When auto manufacturers controlled the whole stack, they did anti-competitive things.
> because business like to point to precedents in other industries to justify actions in their own.
Businesses and PEOPLE. It's the first rule of fairness. "They are allowed to do it, I should be allowed to as well" is often heard, and normally correct. That's not wrong - it's so fundamentally right that it's one of the most-quoted and most important phrases in our supreme law, the Constitution:
nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
* "alleged problem?". Not everyone agrees it's a problem.
Abusing / competing with dealerships is one issue.
There is another issue with vertical integration, and it's been discussed a lot in relation to Comcast having some vertical integration; both producing and distributing content, running the infrastructure and the value-add services on top of that infrastructure. As mentioned elsewhere, dealers make their money via their service department and extras like upgraded stereos and other options. If the manufacturer is the only dealer, that means for some items they are the only service center, and can charge $400 for a radiator cap which should cost $4.
In general, this is another case of every argument we've seen about why it is bad for Comcast to own the fiber, provide the ISP service, have a video service, and deliver the videos over the fiber they control. Same thing - when an automaker (or ISP, or any company) controls the whole stack from top to bottom, they can do things that are not in the interest of consumers.
So the people who wanted more government regulation to protect the little guy from the big bad corporations from Detroit are now Republicans? Okay, if you say so.
> the current rules favor incumbents. The current rules are against progress.
The whole point of these laws is to prevent the big three established automakers from controlling the market and bullying the little guy. Anyone is allowd can sell cars in these states, except for the big bad car companies, so you don't have any 800 pound gorillas bullying the individual dealers.
Dealers are local, so they've been able to successfully lobby state lawmakers to slant the law even against the far-away car companies and toward local dealers. That's ANY local dealers, including local Tesla dealers.
Tesla wants the same thing Ford and GM wanted, a type of monoply known as a vertical integration monoply. A vertical monoply is when one company controls the entire chain from manufacturing major parts (Tesla's battery mega-factories), building the cars, the distribution network, sales, and service.
Contrast to a horizontal monopoly, where one company controls all car sales. In the horizontal, they control only one layer, but completely control that layer. In the vertical, they participate in, but do not necessarily control, control all layers.
To combat these vertical monopolies, voters decided in the 1930s and 1940s that the company who manufacturers parts (Tesla), builds the cars (Tesla), and controls wholesale distribution (Tesla) can't also control sales and service. Other companies get to compete to provide the best sales and service. That's the purpose of the law.
Personally, I'm not sure that I need to be protected from this type of vertical monopoly given the strength of Toyota and Honda in the US. If the big three from Detroit don't treat me right, I'll just buy a Toyota.
By "republicans" you mean "Democrats" . Texas didn't have a single. Republican governor between 1876 and 1983. These laws were passed in the late 1930s and early 1940s (first in 1937). So that's right in the middle of the Democrats' hundred-year reign in Texas.
Of course after that, the Republicans took over Texas, the economy boomed, and everyone fleeing California started moving here.
If they are misdemeanors, no problem. Just be honest. Also check your state law, even though they may ask if you've EVER been convicted, records may be unavailable after a certain number of years and the law may allow you to check the "no" box.
If they are felonies, it makes it harder to get hired, but not at all impossible. You'll just need to submit more resumes than you otherwise would. Maybe take a class on resume writing and interviewing, to balance a weakness with some strengths.
Starting your own business may well be an option- but only if you want to run a business. Running an IT related business is a completely different monster from working as an IT employee.
I'm actually looking to hire someone with an IT background right now, for a commission based sales and marketing position. It could earn good money, or not, depending on if you make the sales. Perhaps someone in your position would be interested in giving it a shot.
Indeed, we know the Egyptians engaged in sea battles at least 3000 years ago.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
They may have had a navy 5000 years ago, that we don't know.
I'd have you over for dinner, and you'd be welcome to bring your friend from China.
Also, I regularly deal with cyber attacks from China. I know the Chinese government is attacking us and seeking new and better ways to attack us. I know they have. Chinese students and businessmen working for them do intelligence, so while they're welcome to come to dinner, there's no reason to show top secret stuff to anyone from China. The risk each time may be small, just as the risk of not wearing a seatbelt once is small, but if you get in the habit of risking disaster you'll eventually have a disaster. There's no need to; there are plenty of Americans to handle the classified stuff, and that's lower risk. Sorry. Please do stay for tea.
Egypt has the largest navy in the Middle East and Africa, and is the seventh largest in the world. They were the first to successfully deploy missiles against other ships.
He-Man ( http://www.mattycollector.com/... ) is a celebrity.
I'm not well-versed enough in Python to to an indepth analysis, but I can say that Python appears to be ideally suited for roles that were once done by shell scripts. The Red Hat installer Anaconda seems like a perfect role for Python, with a lot of interaction with external binaries and very little real computation. The focus of JavaScript, the purpose for which it is created, is of course different.
Further, I would say that unlike Perl or C++, a key constraint on the development of JavaScript was time. Technology moved fast in the early days of the web, and having a workable language now was much better than having a great language ten years later. That resulted in some goofiness like pairs of very similar functions that take their arguments in different, apparently random order. You can't change the argument order of strStr in the next version of the language, so some of that silliness remains. Java is the same in this respect, for the same reason. Java more than JavaScript due to it's very short development timeline. Perl, on the other hand, was slowly developed by a linguist. It's terse, but very consistent and logical.
PHP suffers from a related problem - it was designed as a CMS, not a general purpose programming language, and it was written in Perl. The affects of that still linger, with many of the issues being resolved just recently.
So I'd class JavaScript with Java as languages heavily influenced by schedule and business / marketing considerations of their parent companies, rather than designing a language best for users. C, C++, Perl, and even VB6 are more designed for usage as opposed to marketing of the languages themselves.
A liberal editor COULD try to keep his personal beliefs out of it, so the publication doesn't espouse one position or the other. They could, but New Republic has explicitly chosen to avoid objectivity, they TELL US that the magazine is used to advocate certain positions. Consider what their owner and editor-in-chief says the magazine stands for:
"The New Republic is very much against the Bush tax programs, against Bush Social Security 'reform,' against cutting the inheritance tax, for radical health care changes, passionate about Gore-type environmentalism, for a woman's entitlement to an abortion, for gay marriage, for an increase in the minimum wage, for pursuing aggressively alternatives to our present reliance on oil and our present tax preferences for gas-guzzling automobiles. We were against the confirmation of Justice Alito."
â"Martin Peretz, owner and editor-in-chief, The New Republic
Franklin Foer, New Republic editor:
the magazine âoeinvented the modern usage of the term liberal, and itâ(TM)s one of our historical legacies and obligations to be involved"
They've also had editors who worked two jobs, working for TNR while also working for the KGB. You don't get much more leftist than having the KGB editing the magazine.
Fox News is conservative, of course. The Fox News Radio tagline is something like "the latest news and conservative perspectives". Similarly, New Republic calls itself a liberal journal. To pretend that either is objective would be silly.
Fox used to have one good show, Hannity and Coomes, co-anchored by a liberal and a conservative who would both acknowledge when the other made a good point.
You've made some good points, and ones directly responsive to my statement this time. That is true, once upon time Java was a serious option on the client side and it did have the hype. So much so that Livescript was renamed JavaScript to take advantage of the Java hype. JavaScript won, against actual competition. Ps I WAS around during that time, and I've written ActiveX controls for use on public web pages. JavaScript beat both ActiveX and Java in the browser.
The PayPal link is interesting as well. I was curious what their reasoning was, given the plethora of server-side languages, why choose one that's very much designed for a very different role in a very different environment, with very different constraints? They said the primary reason was so that there front-end Javascript developers could also author the matching server-side portion. That's interesting and a little surprising to me. Note one subtle distinction that may not be important except in the context of this thread - they did not say - JavaScript was best suited for the role of server-side development, they said that they wanted a particular team to do server-side and that team only knew JavaScript.
It turned out that for PayPal, Javascript did the job just fine for them. So I'll revise my statement:
If all you know is JavaScript, it might be enough to get the job done.
If it's client side web browser code, JavaScript is the only workable option because it beat Java in this role.
Otherwise, where you have a choice, JavaScript is NORMALLY not the best suited for any role other than client side web page code. Exceptions may exist.
The open letter from the long-time editors who quit says:
> It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalismâ(TM)s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon.
The very people who make the magazine are very clear that their intention has been that it is "liberalism's central journal". Elsewhere you'll see they honestly and clearly state their intention to promote left-wing liberalism. They aren't pretending to be objective, balanced, or factual.
You could have said the same thing with a lot less words had you phrased it as:
No, I can't think of even one application where you'd consider two languages and decide JavaScript was better for that application.
I didn't say JavaScript doesn't have a lot of features. It does have a large mishmash of features. I said it'll almost always be the worst choice, if you have any other option.
> its intended purpose, making it exceptionally well-fit for the web.
It's the ONLY choice for client-side web. As I said twice before, that's the one place nothing is worse or better - because you have no other choice.
> Java
Since neither iOS nor most Android devices run Java applets, that means MOST users today won't run them. A "solution" that won't run at all for most users isn't a solution. You can't say "Java and JavaScript would both work, but JavaScript would be better".
If you're advocating JavaScript as a server-side language, well that's just silly. Learn any language designed for server-side and after you understand it tell me JavaScript is better suited.
> (Other popular criticisms stem from pure, unadulterated, ignorance: The behavior of this, for example.)
If a key component of the language behaves in unintuitive, surprising, and troublesome ways, that's a valid criticism. See "principle of least surprise".
I said it is the best choice for client-side processing on web pages, because it's the only plausible option. Where other options exist, the others are probably better suited to the task.
If you disagree, can you come up with a counterexample, any scenario where you'd consider using something other than JavaScript, but decide JavaScript is better than the alternative? I'm curious what solutions could be worse than JavaScript. As stated in what you quoted, I do mean solutions - things that would work, but not work as well as JavaScript.