3 ms·

Mine is not a popular opinion and I'll probably lose comment karma for stating it. But Apple wants HTML5 to succeed precisely because it is an absolutely terrib

Mine is not a popular opinion and I'll probably lose comment karma for stating it. But Apple wants HTML5 to succeed precisely because it is an absolutely terrible platform on which to develop apps and games. Therefore, it gives them the illusion of supporting openness while being safe from actually competing against their own dev tools. A lot of geeks love JavaScript and I've never figured out why, having developed in it. (Yes I've read Crockford.) The logic seems to go like this: sure it has problems but functions are first class objects! This means it's like Lisp and everyone knows Lisp is the best! As far as I can tell, arguments for JavaScript being usable don't tend to go much farther than this.

uriel 17y ago
I think the argument for JavaScript is something along the lines of "It could have been much worse". Also, of the whole 'HTML5' stack, JavaScript, the language, is probably one of the least bad parts. The DOM, SVG, all the XML and XML-like bits, the whole GUI paradigm (or lack of thereof) of web apps and so on are much worse.
swannodette 17y ago
Some applications work best on the web. Some applications work best natively. I don't really see this is an either/or thing. I've been doing Cocoa programming and heavy amounts of JavaScript for some time now. Anything bad one camp says about the other is pure FUD. Objective-J is but one example of proof in the pudding. I myself work on a codebase that's nearly 25,0000 lines of JavaScript with a design heavily lifted from my experience with Cocoa. JavaScript's expressive power makes this possible, even trivial. Yet, JavaScripts tooling support is just subpar compared to Apple's. While people complain about XCode, it makes FireBug look like a toy. Also pretty much everything for building interfaces is just Precambrian compared to Apple's. Code generation for UI must die. I could go on and on. As far as the article is concerned: Android, Windows 7 Mobile, and iPhone are all lockins if you develop native apps for them. You have non portable code (unless you're writing a game) who cares how "open" the platform is. It's too early to see how all of this will play out but I guess that doesn't stop everyone from hand-waving every chance they get.

uriel 17y ago

I think the argument for JavaScript is something along the lines of "It could have been much worse". Also, of the whole 'HTML5' stack, JavaScript, the language, is probably one of the least bad parts. The DOM, SVG, all the XML and XML-like bits, the whole GUI paradigm (or lack of thereof) of web apps and so on are much worse.

swannodette 17y ago

Some applications work best on the web. Some applications work best natively. I don't really see this is an either/or thing. I've been doing Cocoa programming and heavy amounts of JavaScript for some time now. Anything bad one camp says about the other is pure FUD. Objective-J is but one example of proof in the pudding. I myself work on a codebase that's nearly 25,0000 lines of JavaScript with a design heavily lifted from my experience with Cocoa. JavaScript's expressive power makes this possible, even trivial. Yet, JavaScripts tooling support is just subpar compared to Apple's. While people complain about XCode, it makes FireBug look like a toy. Also pretty much everything for building interfaces is just Precambrian compared to Apple's. Code generation for UI must die. I could go on and on. As far as the article is concerned: Android, Windows 7 Mobile, and iPhone are all lockins if you develop native apps for them. You have non portable code (unless you're writing a game) who cares how "open" the platform is. It's too early to see how all of this will play out but I guess that doesn't stop everyone from hand-waving every chance they get.