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It's useful, but when that's the only tool one has, it becomes a liability. I like using both JS and Python where it makes sense, but building a medium-sized or
by blub 10y ago
It's useful, but when that's the only tool one has, it becomes a liability. I like using both JS and Python where it makes sense, but building a medium-sized or large app in such languages is asking for trouble.
Some teams make enough of an effort that they are able to deliver such an app. That should not be encouraged, but rather criticized as encouraging development practices. To be clear: they can do whatever they want in their projects. I have a problem when they recommend such methods to others, without being honest about the pitfalls and effort involved.
Re standard library: the STL is currently working great! JS would kill to have something as stable and high quality as the STL.
Re node: I am not aware of any desktop or mobile apps using node. Isn't that a server-side technology?
Re markup: does it matter how much optimized it is and how much caching it does when in the end it's still slow?
Re style sheets: they're great when used for styling, like in Qt (not sure what GTK is doing). But that doesn't scale when building widgets and doing positioning.
pcwalton, web apps have had the potential to do X, Y and Z better than native apps for the past decade. At one point web developers need to talk less and deliver.
- pcwalton 10y ago> I like using both JS and Python where it makes sense, but building a medium-sized or large app in such languages is asking for trouble. There have been tons of reliable large apps written in dynamically typed languages. This is, again, a tiresome argument. > the STL is currently working great! JS would kill to have something as stable and high quality as the STL. The STL took nearly a decade to get hash tables. And for years, users suffered from Microsoft and other vendors taking very different approaches to template expansion, causing no end of ifdef hell. JS never had such issues. > But that doesn't scale when building widgets and doing positioning. Huh? How does flexbox "not scale"? Positioning is just one aspect of style. > At one point web developers need to talk less and deliver I've been working on browsers for 7 years, and on most of those weekends, thanks.
- blub 10y agoThe tide seems to be turning against dynamic languages because developers are getting tired of the poor performance, fragility and maintenance difficulty. We just needed to see some innovation in the static typing camp: the transition from Objective-C to Swift is a great example. A typical app can be made pretty reliable with enough testing effort and a good process, so I'm not surprised that large apps have been written in dynamically typed languages, although I am now curious which apps you had in mind. Can't think of anything the scale of e.g. Photoshop, Oracle or Linux. Re STL: Really? :) I'll take missing hash-tables (dictionaries are fine) any day over no library. I don't know which period you're referring to with the ifdef hell, but at least for the past decade I can't think of any STL compatibility issues. Perhaps you can be more specific here? In any case, JS never had such issues because back then it was being used to make text blink. Now that it's facing more challenges we start seeing the issues. Re working on browsers: you're not a web developer. I will say though that Mozilla pushing this web-everything agenda is disappointing. The FirefoxOS lesson has not been learned...