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I understand THIS project's intent which is to learn and discover how possible it is to achieve, However the fact that I'm seeing more and more Javascipt apps b

by mrmondo 11y ago

I understand THIS project's intent which is to learn and discover how possible it is to achieve, However the fact that I'm seeing more and more Javascipt apps being released for desktops really disappoints and scares me. The performance, weight and often security concerns that come with JS frameworks is frightening and while it's fantastic that JS is perhaps lowering the bar as to who can write an application (perhaps) - it's also making it easy to do the wrong thing.

perucoder 11y ago
This is a taste of the future. More and more people are creating things using tools and frameworks but not really understanding the underlying concepts. When I pick up a bookshelf at IKEA and put it together, I don't start calling myself a carpenter because of it.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Taste of the past too. In my first programming job, there were a few senior programmers who were then in their 50s, meaning they started programming in the 70s (before microcomputers). In those days, the way you became a programmer was to major in electrical engineering. That's why even now, a number of top universities (MIT, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Rice) have combined departments of "electrical engineering and computer science". How many C++ and Java programmers these days know how to work their way around NAND gates, digital logic, and RCI circuits? How many know how a transistor works? How many know how to build a mux in hardware, or an adder, or what's in a RAM cell? I'm sure there are some, but by and large, I think it's an improvement that we don't think about digital logic and binary representations when we write our program. The cycle of moving up the abstraction hierarchy has been going on since high-level languages were invented in the 50s. Today's tools and frameworks are the low-level building blocks of tomorrow.
eatonphil 11y ago
Do you not think a similar thing was said when Cobol came out and young, new developers started abandoning assembly? I don't think being disappointed or scared is necessarily the most reasonable reaction to have in light of the fact that this is just the way technology works. And in the end, it probably is a good thing.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  Except Cobol didn't suddenly gain a lot of popularity after C++ was well established. There are plenty of languages even more abstract (and I would argue easy to use) than JavaScript, some of which don't sacrifice nearly as much performance. The movement to JavaScript is a product of web developers branching out into other areas (great!) without taking the time to learn another language (not so great :/). I don't think performance is an end in and of itself, and I don't turn my nose up at picking a technology because developers and expensive and processing power is cheap, but I still think writing everything in JavaScript is a step backward. edit: Accidentally wrote developers are cheap and processing power is expensive :P
mplewis 11y ago
Making a programming language harder to use, or making a build chain more difficult to get working, doesn't make software better. Raising the barrier to entry doesn't "raise the bar" when it comes to software quality. It just adds artificial difficulty. The hard part about writing software shouldn't be Hello World. It should be building a user experience people enjoy. The less steps to get to that point, the better.
- perucoder 11y ago
  I'm not sure if it works that way in real life. Dreamweaver made it really simple to create websites but look at the quality of what was produced. Any good developer would not use this tool even though it did make things simpler
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    That's a quality/ubiquity tradeoff. Dreamweaver converted non-consumers into shitty programmers. It didn't actually reduce the quality of anyone's existing HTML, it just increased the quantity of HTML out there, and of course the marginal machine-generated HTML is going to be worse than that written by experts with 5 years of experience. Average software quality declines, but this is a Simpson's-paradox effect, not a decline in the output of any one person's software. Ditto PHP, Node.js, Rails, and any other technology aimed at opening up programming to a larger audience. This trend has a while to go: while there are vastly more programmers out there than when I started programming, there are still vastly more non-programmers than programmers, and I believe that ultimately mastery of machines will become as important as literacy.
pka 11y ago
How can a script running in a VM be less secure than the ability to run unchecked gets() & friends?!
DiThi 11y ago
JS performs well, JS VMs are small enough (or at least comparable to Java's core) and since it runs local code instead of code from the internet, it's pretty secure. I've done desktop applications[0] made with JS, with the .exe being less than 5 MB (including node and all JS code bundled). Your concerns involve bundling whole web browsers with the desktop applications. We'll probably see a desktop version of react-native in the near future, making things much more lightweight. [0] Without barely any GUI, it was mostly a canvas.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  > JS performs well As compared to what? Compared to other interpreted languages, sure, but you're looking at least an order of magnitude compared to other VMs.
  - panic 11y ago
    Most UI layout doesn't involve that much computation. JS is definitely fast enough.
    - aikah 11y ago
      > Most UI layout doesn't involve that much computation. JS is definitely fast enough. The performances of editors like Atom or Brackets tell us another story. Web UIs might be fine for an LOB app but then, an LOB app doesn't need to be a desktop app. No, current JS engines (JS is a language, it doesn't have performances) are definitely not fast enough. Compared to the kind of performances that can be achieved with the JVM or QT.
      - panic 11y ago
        Doesn't Atom use a web rendering engine? We're not talking about the DOM here, just pure JS.
        johncolanduoni 11y ago

by mrmondo 11y ago

perucoder 11y ago

This is a taste of the future. More and more people are creating things using tools and frameworks but not really understanding the underlying concepts. When I pick up a bookshelf at IKEA and put it together, I don't start calling myself a carpenter because of it.

nostrademons 11y ago
Taste of the past too. In my first programming job, there were a few senior programmers who were then in their 50s, meaning they started programming in the 70s (before microcomputers). In those days, the way you became a programmer was to major in electrical engineering. That's why even now, a number of top universities (MIT, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Rice) have combined departments of "electrical engineering and computer science". How many C++ and Java programmers these days know how to work their way around NAND gates, digital logic, and RCI circuits? How many know how a transistor works? How many know how to build a mux in hardware, or an adder, or what's in a RAM cell? I'm sure there are some, but by and large, I think it's an improvement that we don't think about digital logic and binary representations when we write our program. The cycle of moving up the abstraction hierarchy has been going on since high-level languages were invented in the 50s. Today's tools and frameworks are the low-level building blocks of tomorrow.

eatonphil 11y ago

Do you not think a similar thing was said when Cobol came out and young, new developers started abandoning assembly? I don't think being disappointed or scared is necessarily the most reasonable reaction to have in light of the fact that this is just the way technology works. And in the end, it probably is a good thing.

johncolanduoni 11y ago
Except Cobol didn't suddenly gain a lot of popularity after C++ was well established. There are plenty of languages even more abstract (and I would argue easy to use) than JavaScript, some of which don't sacrifice nearly as much performance. The movement to JavaScript is a product of web developers branching out into other areas (great!) without taking the time to learn another language (not so great :/). I don't think performance is an end in and of itself, and I don't turn my nose up at picking a technology because developers and expensive and processing power is cheap, but I still think writing everything in JavaScript is a step backward. edit: Accidentally wrote developers are cheap and processing power is expensive :P

mplewis 11y ago

Making a programming language harder to use, or making a build chain more difficult to get working, doesn't make software better. Raising the barrier to entry doesn't "raise the bar" when it comes to software quality. It just adds artificial difficulty. The hard part about writing software shouldn't be Hello World. It should be building a user experience people enjoy. The less steps to get to that point, the better.

perucoder 11y ago
I'm not sure if it works that way in real life. Dreamweaver made it really simple to create websites but look at the quality of what was produced. Any good developer would not use this tool even though it did make things simpler
- nostrademons 11y ago
  That's a quality/ubiquity tradeoff. Dreamweaver converted non-consumers into shitty programmers. It didn't actually reduce the quality of anyone's existing HTML, it just increased the quantity of HTML out there, and of course the marginal machine-generated HTML is going to be worse than that written by experts with 5 years of experience. Average software quality declines, but this is a Simpson's-paradox effect, not a decline in the output of any one person's software. Ditto PHP, Node.js, Rails, and any other technology aimed at opening up programming to a larger audience. This trend has a while to go: while there are vastly more programmers out there than when I started programming, there are still vastly more non-programmers than programmers, and I believe that ultimately mastery of machines will become as important as literacy.

pka 11y ago

How can a script running in a VM be less secure than the ability to run unchecked gets() & friends?!

DiThi 11y ago

JS performs well, JS VMs are small enough (or at least comparable to Java's core) and since it runs local code instead of code from the internet, it's pretty secure. I've done desktop applications[0] made with JS, with the .exe being less than 5 MB (including node and all JS code bundled). Your concerns involve bundling whole web browsers with the desktop applications. We'll probably see a desktop version of react-native in the near future, making things much more lightweight. [0] Without barely any GUI, it was mostly a canvas.

johncolanduoni 11y ago
> JS performs well As compared to what? Compared to other interpreted languages, sure, but you're looking at least an order of magnitude compared to other VMs.
- panic 11y ago
  Most UI layout doesn't involve that much computation. JS is definitely fast enough.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Most UI layout doesn't involve that much computation. JS is definitely fast enough. The performances of editors like Atom or Brackets tell us another story. Web UIs might be fine for an LOB app but then, an LOB app doesn't need to be a desktop app. No, current JS engines (JS is a language, it doesn't have performances) are definitely not fast enough. Compared to the kind of performances that can be achieved with the JVM or QT.
    - panic 11y ago
      Doesn't Atom use a web rendering engine? We're not talking about the DOM here, just pure JS.
      - johncolanduoni 11y ago