JS is not a functional programming language. It has a lot of functional attributes, but it is very heavily skewed toward imperative approaches to problems, and it's a stateful mess.
Nothing you said makes my point nonsense. The only thing that is going to go head-to-head with JS is a properly functional language. The fact that JS adopts more functional concepts and encourages more functional approaches only underscores that.
This is fascinating, and I think it gets to a lot of the gripes I see in comments here. Basically, the longed-for slashdot of old was designed for rapid consumption of low-density news data at a fast pace. The slashdot we all experience now provides that, but the complaint is that the superficial browsing you describe yields less of a fix for data-hungry readers than it used to.
Frankly, I think the level of discussion has gone up as the level of satisfaction has gone down. I come here for the comments.
Thanks for at least giving me some interesting meta-discussion!
Frankly, the only thing that's going to upend the JS dominance of client-side web programming is a functional language. There isn't a compelling reason to trade OOP horses on the web. There's a good reason to choose a better paradigm for the problem. A functional paradigm with a good immutability story is going to have a much better time convincing people to rethink how they program web apps with a focus on user interaction over time.
There isn't much point in vying for who can do the best at mixing data and behavior. Separating those will be a good way to compel people to consider alternatives.
CoffeeScript has too much in common with JavaScript, with too many of its own esoteric compromises, to be a good compile-to-JS contender. It also has the disadvantage of being fucking awful.
If we're picking languages that compile to JS, we have a lot of options. Why would we pick something that is such a derivative work? If I'm going to be that close to the metal, I'd rather just write on the metal.
Since JavaScript is increasingly also a compilation target, the fact that it continues to dominate is a good indicator that the competition among compile-to-JS languages is strong.
One of those biggest companies on earth promotes both Go and Java as compile-to-JS languages with less success than I would expect.
Granted I'd prefer to see ClojureScript grow, but I am not placing any bets there.
For fuck's sake. This ring "can make you disappear". Read TFA or at least TFS.
And while we're at it... this tablecloth can make you disappear. This foolish incantation can make you disappear. This Radiohead song can make you disappear. I'm pretty sure a little thinking can make you disappear. PEEKABOO can make you disappear!
No, a threat is a threat. If I threaten to make you disappear, and you don't feel that I'm joking, you won't care whether I added "by using magic" as how I would do it.
I'm gonna make you think really hard about how stupid that sounds... by using magic.
Huh? There was literally nothing involving a firearm in this story. Neither were the other disciplinary actions the kid has faced mentioned in the article.
My text editor (I prefer TextMate, but Sublime shares a lot of its roots with TM) is another one with lots of menu stuff. Truth be told, 90% of it could go away and I'd never notice (because I am only coding in a handful of languages and don't need a universal editor all of the time). But I think these complex tools are an exception, and I would not provide tools like that to the vast majority of people who are better served by a simple editor like TextEdit (which is far simpler, but also far more powerful than Notepad).
That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus!
Oh come on, this is just brushing the problem under the rug. You're moving all of that complexity out of view, but you're not removing it. Making HTTP requests is hardly a complex thing for a user. I do it with my web browser all the time without having to check a single checkbox ever. The whole example is kind of contrived, but the point is that engineers design poor UIs. Whether those UIs are visible or tucked away to be less discoverable is hardly material. The fact that it's a front-end to wget points to the fact that the UI of the underlying command prompt is the source of the design problem, and that has neither menus nor checkboxes! They're all fundamentally the same UI, just presented (or not) slightly differently.
Making software simple to use is quite hard, but it's worth doing, and it doesn't mean the software is not powerful or useful. It's the difference between computing being accessible to everyone versus reserved for people who have spare time or resources (like income) to dedicate to it.
Look. I won't even appeal to my own authority, as a software developer with over a decade of UI experience. I'm sure you're also an experienced developer with UI chops, and I don't want to have a bigger dick contest. Instead, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... - it's actually a pretty decent article for Wikipedia, and may be helpful in understanding what I was talking about (if you have any interest in understanding what others are talking about, instead of just trying to be "right" on the Internet).
Yeah okay, "UI" just means how a thing looks and Chrome is uniquely terrible. Goodness forbid I try to expand the conversation a little without it being an all-or-nothing debate.
And all of those things are invisible elements that you require zero feedback from? Read what you said and get back to me when you figure out what is wrong with it.
Not all, but they're all expressing more than just a pixel configuration on a screen.
The only browser I have installed that looks unconventional is Chromium. Neither version of Opera, Firefox Nightly, Midori or QupZilla have this problem.
Yeah, okay. Glad we've reached the endless repetition portion of this conversation. Cheers!
Funny, when I download software with lots of stuff in menus, I usually view it as stuff like this: http://www.uxdesignedge.com/wp...
I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.
That isn't what I meant by native menus, and Firefox does actually use *those*. What I meant is that menus rendered for selects/dropdowns/context are fakes that neither look nor behave as a Mac user expects.
As far as where a menu bar in an OS belongs... More often than not, it doesn't belong anywhere. If your application needs to provide so many operations that it needs to hide many of them in a multi-dimensional listing, your application either does too much or is poorly designed for user interaction. There are some (few) exceptions to this, but for most purposes menu bars should be considered legacy UI elements providing redundancy for users who expect every operation to be catalogued in a single place. Their primary function at this point is to provide a visual listing of all of the (also hopefully few) keyboard combinations available. If this approach is taken, it does not matter where the menu is positioned.
UI stands for "user interface", which are the visualizations you see when interacting with a graphical shell. If something does not conform to the UI, that means it has its own UI that doesn't fit in.
I beg your pardon. UI stands for user interface, which is the way a user interfaces with an application. Yes, that includes appearance, but it is far from only that. The behaviors of menus, cursor interactions, focus, stacking, direction of elements, language, are all factors in a UI. Even vague things like "feel" which includes such nit picks as which elements of an interface respond to interaction while in the background, how a caret moves through a text field, what portions of a window are draggable. All of this and more is user interface.
Because that is what the browser is. The UI portion is peanuts, as proven by the fact that ONLY Google has screwed this up. Nobody else has.
And you listed other browsers using the same rendering engine as Chrome, so clearly the rendering engine has fuck all to do with the UI.
In Windows I don't have this problem. Every browser works pretty much like any other application, menus are where they should be, shortcuts are corrects, etc. The UI itself is an eyesore though and it's annoying to have just the one application that doesn't look right. It also makes it pretty much impossible to read some text in the UI due to conflicting colour schemes.
I'm pleased you see this much UI conformity in Windows. My experience on Windows is not the same, but I am also considering a much broader set of expectations (as listed above).
To clarify this entire conversation: we had a misunderstanding about what you meant by "UI", and diverged from there. Obviously Chrome looks out of place in some environments, because it has a fairly distinctive appearance of its own. Yes, I agree it can be annoying. But my point was that every current browser does unconventional things in their UI, because the UI toolkits available to them are too limited for the needs of a good browser interface. I hope we can agree that is the case as ell?
Slashdot Mirror
JS is not a functional programming language. It has a lot of functional attributes, but it is very heavily skewed toward imperative approaches to problems, and it's a stateful mess.
The syntax is far from JS's only problem.
Nothing you said makes my point nonsense. The only thing that is going to go head-to-head with JS is a properly functional language. The fact that JS adopts more functional concepts and encourages more functional approaches only underscores that.
This is fascinating, and I think it gets to a lot of the gripes I see in comments here. Basically, the longed-for slashdot of old was designed for rapid consumption of low-density news data at a fast pace. The slashdot we all experience now provides that, but the complaint is that the superficial browsing you describe yields less of a fix for data-hungry readers than it used to.
Frankly, I think the level of discussion has gone up as the level of satisfaction has gone down. I come here for the comments.
Thanks for at least giving me some interesting meta-discussion!
Frankly, the only thing that's going to upend the JS dominance of client-side web programming is a functional language. There isn't a compelling reason to trade OOP horses on the web. There's a good reason to choose a better paradigm for the problem. A functional paradigm with a good immutability story is going to have a much better time convincing people to rethink how they program web apps with a focus on user interaction over time.
There isn't much point in vying for who can do the best at mixing data and behavior. Separating those will be a good way to compel people to consider alternatives.
Genuine question: don't you?
CoffeeScript has too much in common with JavaScript, with too many of its own esoteric compromises, to be a good compile-to-JS contender. It also has the disadvantage of being fucking awful.
If we're picking languages that compile to JS, we have a lot of options. Why would we pick something that is such a derivative work? If I'm going to be that close to the metal, I'd rather just write on the metal.
Since JavaScript is increasingly also a compilation target, the fact that it continues to dominate is a good indicator that the competition among compile-to-JS languages is strong.
One of those biggest companies on earth promotes both Go and Java as compile-to-JS languages with less success than I would expect.
Granted I'd prefer to see ClojureScript grow, but I am not placing any bets there.
I hope that depends whether you're counting sittings versus time spent.
grammar Nazi
I think it's "grammar nazi". They're not actually National Socialists about grammar, it's just a figure of speech.
Okay then... there was literally nothing involving violence or threats in the story.
War on Christmas
For fuck's sake. This ring "can make you disappear". Read TFA or at least TFS.
And while we're at it... this tablecloth can make you disappear. This foolish incantation can make you disappear. This Radiohead song can make you disappear. I'm pretty sure a little thinking can make you disappear. PEEKABOO can make you disappear!
No, a threat is a threat. If I threaten to make you disappear, and you don't feel that I'm joking, you won't care whether I added "by using magic" as how I would do it.
I'm gonna make you think really hard about how stupid that sounds... by using magic.
If refusing to compound the punishment of your child for playful make-believe is "bad parenting", this world needs more bad parents.
Huh? There was literally nothing involving a firearm in this story. Neither were the other disciplinary actions the kid has faced mentioned in the article.
That's great if you're the kind of person who fits into the midwest, but what you're getting for your additional money out here is tolerance.
Since when does tolerance mean attacking things you obviously don't know the first thing about?
You get to live in a place where diversity isn't shit upon immediately.
Clearly.
My text editor (I prefer TextMate, but Sublime shares a lot of its roots with TM) is another one with lots of menu stuff. Truth be told, 90% of it could go away and I'd never notice (because I am only coding in a handful of languages and don't need a universal editor all of the time). But I think these complex tools are an exception, and I would not provide tools like that to the vast majority of people who are better served by a simple editor like TextEdit (which is far simpler, but also far more powerful than Notepad).
That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus!
Oh come on, this is just brushing the problem under the rug. You're moving all of that complexity out of view, but you're not removing it. Making HTTP requests is hardly a complex thing for a user. I do it with my web browser all the time without having to check a single checkbox ever. The whole example is kind of contrived, but the point is that engineers design poor UIs. Whether those UIs are visible or tucked away to be less discoverable is hardly material. The fact that it's a front-end to wget points to the fact that the UI of the underlying command prompt is the source of the design problem, and that has neither menus nor checkboxes! They're all fundamentally the same UI, just presented (or not) slightly differently.
Making software simple to use is quite hard, but it's worth doing, and it doesn't mean the software is not powerful or useful. It's the difference between computing being accessible to everyone versus reserved for people who have spare time or resources (like income) to dedicate to it.
Look. I won't even appeal to my own authority, as a software developer with over a decade of UI experience. I'm sure you're also an experienced developer with UI chops, and I don't want to have a bigger dick contest. Instead, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... - it's actually a pretty decent article for Wikipedia, and may be helpful in understanding what I was talking about (if you have any interest in understanding what others are talking about, instead of just trying to be "right" on the Internet).
Have a nice day.
Yeah okay, "UI" just means how a thing looks and Chrome is uniquely terrible. Goodness forbid I try to expand the conversation a little without it being an all-or-nothing debate.
And all of those things are invisible elements that you require zero feedback from? Read what you said and get back to me when you figure out what is wrong with it.
Not all, but they're all expressing more than just a pixel configuration on a screen.
The only browser I have installed that looks unconventional is Chromium. Neither version of Opera, Firefox Nightly, Midori or QupZilla have this problem.
Yeah, okay. Glad we've reached the endless repetition portion of this conversation. Cheers!
Really? The problem with government is that the people in it are "evil"? Are you twelve years old?
Funny, when I download software with lots of stuff in menus, I usually view it as stuff like this: http://www.uxdesignedge.com/wp...
I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.
That isn't what I meant by native menus, and Firefox does actually use *those*. What I meant is that menus rendered for selects/dropdowns/context are fakes that neither look nor behave as a Mac user expects.
As far as where a menu bar in an OS belongs... More often than not, it doesn't belong anywhere. If your application needs to provide so many operations that it needs to hide many of them in a multi-dimensional listing, your application either does too much or is poorly designed for user interaction. There are some (few) exceptions to this, but for most purposes menu bars should be considered legacy UI elements providing redundancy for users who expect every operation to be catalogued in a single place. Their primary function at this point is to provide a visual listing of all of the (also hopefully few) keyboard combinations available. If this approach is taken, it does not matter where the menu is positioned.
UI stands for "user interface", which are the visualizations you see when interacting with a graphical shell. If something does not conform to the UI, that means it has its own UI that doesn't fit in.
I beg your pardon. UI stands for user interface, which is the way a user interfaces with an application. Yes, that includes appearance, but it is far from only that. The behaviors of menus, cursor interactions, focus, stacking, direction of elements, language, are all factors in a UI. Even vague things like "feel" which includes such nit picks as which elements of an interface respond to interaction while in the background, how a caret moves through a text field, what portions of a window are draggable. All of this and more is user interface.
Because that is what the browser is. The UI portion is peanuts, as proven by the fact that ONLY Google has screwed this up. Nobody else has.
And you listed other browsers using the same rendering engine as Chrome, so clearly the rendering engine has fuck all to do with the UI.
In Windows I don't have this problem. Every browser works pretty much like any other application, menus are where they should be, shortcuts are corrects, etc. The UI itself is an eyesore though and it's annoying to have just the one application that doesn't look right. It also makes it pretty much impossible to read some text in the UI due to conflicting colour schemes.
I'm pleased you see this much UI conformity in Windows. My experience on Windows is not the same, but I am also considering a much broader set of expectations (as listed above).
To clarify this entire conversation: we had a misunderstanding about what you meant by "UI", and diverged from there. Obviously Chrome looks out of place in some environments, because it has a fairly distinctive appearance of its own. Yes, I agree it can be annoying. But my point was that every current browser does unconventional things in their UI, because the UI toolkits available to them are too limited for the needs of a good browser interface. I hope we can agree that is the case as ell?
people who love to make excuses for paying more to do less.
Why on earth would anyone do this? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?