4 ms·

JavaScript is fine as a language. However, if it had never been allowed to run without user consent, it wouldn't be such a scourge as there would be minimal ads

JavaScript is fine as a language. However, if it had never been allowed to run without user consent, it wouldn't be such a scourge as there would be minimal ads, minimal cross-site tracking and most sites wouldn't be able to justify a user prompt just to enable a useless animation.

Safety1stClyde 10y ago
The top post on hacker news today is about "The Boring Company" and literally nothing on this page functions without enabling the JavaTurds.
Pharylon 10y ago
JavaScript is a deeply flawed language. It has both undefined and null. You almost never use the == operator... except as a workaround to easily check if something is either null or undefined. That being said, modern JavaScript is actually pretty nice, once you know where the pitfalls are. But if JavaScript wasn't allowed to run by default, it would have never reached it's current level. It'd still be a deeply flawed toy scripting language.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  "But if JavaScript wasn't allowed to run by default, it would have never reached it's current level." I was thinking about that too but I'm not sure it's true. There are some real universally useful applications (e.g. maps; office suites; email; heck, even social media) that require some code to function and I think just about everyone would have been OK with having to grant permissions one time to use them. And all the companies currently making those types of applications helped make JS what it is. Although the most prominent one is the one that has made all it's money on ads and tracking so maybe that's not such a good argument. Anyway, now that we have JS in its current state, maybe we could think about starting to prompt by default, starting with JS from external domains :) (I know, fat chance).
  - jack9 10y ago
    I think you aren't quite understanding the point. It's not that some language wouldn't have dominated (in the interest of interoperability and functionality needs), but that it probably would have been a product by MS or some other homebrew language. Javascript being codified with the hackneyed ecmascript standard, was the death nell for efficiency in web apps for the last few decades. Without the standard, we probably would have seen a shift to other technologies (some of which would have failed like Silverlight) on emerging browsers, in hindsight.

Safety1stClyde 10y ago

The top post on hacker news today is about "The Boring Company" and literally nothing on this page functions without enabling the JavaTurds.

Pharylon 10y ago

JavaScript is a deeply flawed language. It has both undefined and null. You almost never use the == operator... except as a workaround to easily check if something is either null or undefined. That being said, modern JavaScript is actually pretty nice, once you know where the pitfalls are. But if JavaScript wasn't allowed to run by default, it would have never reached it's current level. It'd still be a deeply flawed toy scripting language.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
"But if JavaScript wasn't allowed to run by default, it would have never reached it's current level." I was thinking about that too but I'm not sure it's true. There are some real universally useful applications (e.g. maps; office suites; email; heck, even social media) that require some code to function and I think just about everyone would have been OK with having to grant permissions one time to use them. And all the companies currently making those types of applications helped make JS what it is. Although the most prominent one is the one that has made all it's money on ads and tracking so maybe that's not such a good argument. Anyway, now that we have JS in its current state, maybe we could think about starting to prompt by default, starting with JS from external domains :) (I know, fat chance).
- jack9 10y ago
  I think you aren't quite understanding the point. It's not that some language wouldn't have dominated (in the interest of interoperability and functionality needs), but that it probably would have been a product by MS or some other homebrew language. Javascript being codified with the hackneyed ecmascript standard, was the death nell for efficiency in web apps for the last few decades. Without the standard, we probably would have seen a shift to other technologies (some of which would have failed like Silverlight) on emerging browsers, in hindsight.