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"Open and debuggable: WebAssembly is designed to be pretty-printed in a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, an

"Open and debuggable: WebAssembly is designed to be pretty-printed in a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, and writing programs by hand. The textual format will be used when viewing the source of wasm modules on the web."[1] What would you like to see happen here? Maybe you should give them your input. 1. https://webassembly.github.io/ https://webassembly.github.io/

dccoolgai 10y ago
It's Assembly, hombre. In my class of like 40 kids in college I remember one who really like to read and code in that. Maybe you are that guy - and more power to you... but the web has to work for the other 39 of us. That's what WASM is taking away IMHO.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Do a little reading about the wasm text format. It's not assembly, its meant to be read by JavaScript developers.
- fizzbatter 10y ago
  First off, sorry for the downvotes. Your opinion is unpopular, but it breeds discussion. Now.. I'm so lost, why on earth are you reading binaries? You keep citing examples of cleaning up after other people for a job. Why don't you have their source code? If your job was with any other language, you would have the source code - you would not be given a Go binary and told to "fix what those previous morons did" - you would demand the source. Are you saying that you are frequently given minified javascript off of some website and that the previous workers left with the source code?
  - dccoolgai 10y ago
    First, no worries. If I have karma, there is no better way to spend it than advocating for a more maintainable Open Web in my opinion. As for "I'm so lost, why on earth are you reading binaries?" Consider every Perl/Haskell`/Smalltalk/COBOL developer for a moment. Do you think it's more likely that when this becomes a production standard they are going to say to themselves "You know what, I feel bad for the guys that will have to maintain this I'm just going to learn JS so at least it can be maintained in the same language the rest of the web is"... because I think it's probably more likely that they will immediately start transpiling binaries from COBOL etc, into WASM to run the web. Great for them, really but that's what leaves us with binaries to deal with.
    - justinpombrio 10y ago
      Would you mind answering the second half of that question? I'm curious. > You keep citing examples of cleaning up after other people for a job. Why don't you have their source code?
      - dccoolgai 10y ago
        Sure, let's have a karma bonfire: Sometimes I inherit minified code from someone who was hired years ago and for one of msny reasons is not available any more. It doesn't happen every day, thankfully. When it does, I'm happy that I can at least read and repurpose the JS that's left. Downvote away.
        onion2k 10y ago
        If that's the case then you (or your clients, or whoever owns the code) have some rather serious code management issues. The answer is to fix that problem, not to suggest the programming language is broken because the compiled result isn't readable. If you were working in C/Java/etc I'm sure your first reaction to the same problem wouldn't be "C is broken because I can't debug a compiled executable easily!".
        dccoolgai 10y ago
        You seem to be suggesting that if I only had the source, that would solve all of my problems but that is one of my biggest fears about WASM to be honest- because the source of the web has always been JS or something extremely close to it, like coffescript or Typescript. Now someone could start writing source for the web in COBOL. I hope I'm wrong about this, and -50 karma from this thread is telling me most people think I am, but I genuinely fear a less maintainable Web.
        onion2k 10y ago
        I don't think that's a valid complaint given the number of languages that can already be compiled to JS. Including COBOL ... https://github.com/ajlopez/CobolScript https://github.com/ajlopez/CobolScript It's a long list: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu... Also, ultimately, there will be code that you can't maintain because you don't understand it. That might be because it's written in a language you don't know, but it might also be because it's written in a style you don't understand, or with a framework you've never used, or because it's about a topic that you haven't spent time with. That's OK. You don't need to be able to do everything.

dccoolgai 10y ago

It's Assembly, hombre. In my class of like 40 kids in college I remember one who really like to read and code in that. Maybe you are that guy - and more power to you... but the web has to work for the other 39 of us. That's what WASM is taking away IMHO.

Klathmon 10y ago
Do a little reading about the wasm text format. It's not assembly, its meant to be read by JavaScript developers.
fizzbatter 10y ago
First off, sorry for the downvotes. Your opinion is unpopular, but it breeds discussion. Now.. I'm so lost, why on earth are you reading binaries? You keep citing examples of cleaning up after other people for a job. Why don't you have their source code? If your job was with any other language, you would have the source code - you would not be given a Go binary and told to "fix what those previous morons did" - you would demand the source. Are you saying that you are frequently given minified javascript off of some website and that the previous workers left with the source code?
- dccoolgai 10y ago
  First, no worries. If I have karma, there is no better way to spend it than advocating for a more maintainable Open Web in my opinion. As for "I'm so lost, why on earth are you reading binaries?" Consider every Perl/Haskell`/Smalltalk/COBOL developer for a moment. Do you think it's more likely that when this becomes a production standard they are going to say to themselves "You know what, I feel bad for the guys that will have to maintain this I'm just going to learn JS so at least it can be maintained in the same language the rest of the web is"... because I think it's probably more likely that they will immediately start transpiling binaries from COBOL etc, into WASM to run the web. Great for them, really but that's what leaves us with binaries to deal with.
  - justinpombrio 10y ago
    Would you mind answering the second half of that question? I'm curious. > You keep citing examples of cleaning up after other people for a job. Why don't you have their source code?
    - dccoolgai 10y ago
      Sure, let's have a karma bonfire: Sometimes I inherit minified code from someone who was hired years ago and for one of msny reasons is not available any more. It doesn't happen every day, thankfully. When it does, I'm happy that I can at least read and repurpose the JS that's left. Downvote away.
      - onion2k 10y ago
        If that's the case then you (or your clients, or whoever owns the code) have some rather serious code management issues. The answer is to fix that problem, not to suggest the programming language is broken because the compiled result isn't readable. If you were working in C/Java/etc I'm sure your first reaction to the same problem wouldn't be "C is broken because I can't debug a compiled executable easily!".
        dccoolgai 10y ago
        You seem to be suggesting that if I only had the source, that would solve all of my problems but that is one of my biggest fears about WASM to be honest- because the source of the web has always been JS or something extremely close to it, like coffescript or Typescript. Now someone could start writing source for the web in COBOL. I hope I'm wrong about this, and -50 karma from this thread is telling me most people think I am, but I genuinely fear a less maintainable Web.
        onion2k 10y ago
        I don't think that's a valid complaint given the number of languages that can already be compiled to JS. Including COBOL ... https://github.com/ajlopez/CobolScript https://github.com/ajlopez/CobolScript It's a long list: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu... Also, ultimately, there will be code that you can't maintain because you don't understand it. That might be because it's written in a language you don't know, but it might also be because it's written in a style you don't understand, or with a framework you've never used, or because it's about a topic that you haven't spent time with. That's OK. You don't need to be able to do everything.