JavaScript is actually quite easy to debug in IE 9, Firefox with Firebug, or Chrome, all of which contain debugging environments. CoffeeScript is harder to debug because it compiles to JS first. Python is harder to debug than JS because the debugging environment sucks by comparison.
You think the people implementing fast calculations for financial firms, can't and aren't using the knowledge and source code for projects in other areas ?
Using the source code is almost certainly against your contract, since it almost certainly becomes property of your employer. It doesn't take a lobotomy...
In any case, I think relatively few people go into science from Wall Street. Once you're fed up with it, it's often too late to go into grad school. Instead, they probably get a job at a technology company...No one in my PhD program was a stockbroker...
You think the people implementing fast calculations for financial firms, can't and aren't using the knowledge and source code for projects in other areas ?
Correct. Do you think they are? That would almost certainly be in violation of their contracts...
I'm talking out of my ass here, but I was under the understanding that OpenJDK (or at least IcedTea) has the same field of use restrictions as any other Java implementation, which come from Sun's patent licensing, and can't be avoided by building a clean room implementation.
It seems highly unlikely that Apple would lock down the Mac to only App Store apps. It would really piss off both users and developers. I think Apple is more interested in (slowly) moving to a world where the Mac doesn't exist, and everyone uses an iPad or derivative.
PLoS ONE is a peer-reviewed journal. The point is that they will publish anything as long as it passes peer review and promise a quick review process, not that they publish things before they are peer reviewed.
There are places online that will publish manuscripts before they are reviewed (arXiv.org, Nature Precedings, etc.). PLoS ONE isn't one of them.
Why? You need to have the copyright to begin with to be able to make it closed source. And if you have the copyright, you can do pretty much anything with your software, including distribute it through the App Store while simultaneously licensing the source under any open source license you want.
This is just stupidity on the part of the Growl developers. Developers added support for Growl to their products because it was FOSS. The net effect of selling Growl and making it closed source is going to be that developers either won't support Growl, or they will support the older version of Growl that's still FOSS.
What tasks greatly benefit from more CPUs in the same machine, as opposed to getting more machines with more CPUs and writing software that scales across them? You can put 80 Westmere-EX cores into one machine. To me, that seems like a fuckton. But I admit that I don't know much about scaling systems, so I'm curious why you would need more.
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...
What you are suggesting has existed since Netscape 4, and it's called LiveConnect. The problem is that the Java plug-in is slow as all fucking hell to start, which makes this approach very unpleasant. The other problem is that no one can make the Java plug-in any faster, because it's closed-source.
Flash (ActionScript) is JavaScript with a few non-standard extensions. It exposes very different APIs, but the APIs are not part of the language.
Virtually everyone agrees that the DOM (the set of APIs available to JavaScript running on a webpage) sucks. The debate is about whether JavaScript itself should be replaced with a different programming language.
I think you've missed the entire point of the Add-on SDK, which is that the available APIs remain the same between Firefox releases. They have to release updates for every Firefox version so that this is the case.
I've personally switched to Chrome everywhere, and looking at getting the entire office at work switched from Firefox to Chrome as well (the rapid release cycle of Firefox is nuts, its more rapid than even Chrome and the browser only gets worse with each new release anyway.)
The Chrome release cycle is six weeks, the same as the current Firefox release cycle. The release cycles are effectively identical. The only difference is that, with Chrome, updates are mandatory. You can't disable auto-update, and you don't get a warning when it's going to happen. Where do people get this information?
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?
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.
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.
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.
In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.
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JavaScript is actually quite easy to debug in IE 9, Firefox with Firebug, or Chrome, all of which contain debugging environments. CoffeeScript is harder to debug because it compiles to JS first. Python is harder to debug than JS because the debugging environment sucks by comparison.
Your original post was:
Using the source code is almost certainly against your contract, since it almost certainly becomes property of your employer. It doesn't take a lobotomy...
In any case, I think relatively few people go into science from Wall Street. Once you're fed up with it, it's often too late to go into grad school. Instead, they probably get a job at a technology company...No one in my PhD program was a stockbroker...
Correct. Do you think they are? That would almost certainly be in violation of their contracts...
But without rapid release, apparently.
I'm talking out of my ass here, but I was under the understanding that OpenJDK (or at least IcedTea) has the same field of use restrictions as any other Java implementation, which come from Sun's patent licensing, and can't be avoided by building a clean room implementation.
It seems highly unlikely that Apple would lock down the Mac to only App Store apps. It would really piss off both users and developers. I think Apple is more interested in (slowly) moving to a world where the Mac doesn't exist, and everyone uses an iPad or derivative.
PLoS ONE is a peer-reviewed journal. The point is that they will publish anything as long as it passes peer review and promise a quick review process, not that they publish things before they are peer reviewed.
There are places online that will publish manuscripts before they are reviewed (arXiv.org, Nature Precedings, etc.). PLoS ONE isn't one of them.
Actually, PLoS One is a peer-reviewed journal, as you would know if you were actually qualified to review it.
The bar code where the license plate would have been is Jobs's VIN.
Why? You need to have the copyright to begin with to be able to make it closed source. And if you have the copyright, you can do pretty much anything with your software, including distribute it through the App Store while simultaneously licensing the source under any open source license you want.
This is just stupidity on the part of the Growl developers. Developers added support for Growl to their products because it was FOSS. The net effect of selling Growl and making it closed source is going to be that developers either won't support Growl, or they will support the older version of Growl that's still FOSS.
1-Perception of speed is more important than a synthetic benchmark number....
What!? You mean that "Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler" don't capture the use cases of modern websites?
What tasks greatly benefit from more CPUs in the same machine, as opposed to getting more machines with more CPUs and writing software that scales across them? You can put 80 Westmere-EX cores into one machine. To me, that seems like a fuckton. But I admit that I don't know much about scaling systems, so I'm curious why you would need more.
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...
This exists/existed. Jaxer was supposed to be able to do this, but I never used it, and I've never met anyone who has.
What you are suggesting has existed since Netscape 4, and it's called LiveConnect. The problem is that the Java plug-in is slow as all fucking hell to start, which makes this approach very unpleasant. The other problem is that no one can make the Java plug-in any faster, because it's closed-source.
Flash (ActionScript) is JavaScript with a few non-standard extensions. It exposes very different APIs, but the APIs are not part of the language.
Virtually everyone agrees that the DOM (the set of APIs available to JavaScript running on a webpage) sucks. The debate is about whether JavaScript itself should be replaced with a different programming language.
I think you've missed the entire point of the Add-on SDK, which is that the available APIs remain the same between Firefox releases. They have to release updates for every Firefox version so that this is the case.
I've personally switched to Chrome everywhere, and looking at getting the entire office at work switched from Firefox to Chrome as well (the rapid release cycle of Firefox is nuts, its more rapid than even Chrome and the browser only gets worse with each new release anyway.)
The Chrome release cycle is six weeks, the same as the current Firefox release cycle. The release cycles are effectively identical. The only difference is that, with Chrome, updates are mandatory. You can't disable auto-update, and you don't get a warning when it's going to happen. Where do people get this information?
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?
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.
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.
This is false.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_web_workers
Supported by Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome 3+, and IE 10.
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.
Does the IPad[2] have flash? No
Might this be regarded by some people as a feature, rather than a missing feature? Yes.
Who would find this to be a feature? Especially considering you don't have to install flash on any tablet that has it.
Those of us who support open standards. If all tablets could run Flash, there would be more Flash out there. That's bad for HTML5.
In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.