5 ms·

Well you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Don't expect quality js tools to emerge from an ecosystem which is rotting at its core.

by edem 9y ago

remline 9y ago
Es6 has some nice moderate changes that can trickle up.. An infinite number of bad tools and frameworks doesn't really stop a good one from coming along anymore than all the low quality OSes and environs that had a libc and compiler stopped C.
- pluma 9y ago
  Honestly this entire argument sounds like "Linux is terrible because there are so many useless and terrible distros". Just use Ubuntu because that's what everybody uses. Or spend some effort looking into it and see if you end up with Debian or maybe CentOS or Arch.
pluma 9y ago
What did I miss? How is "the JS ecosystem" rotting at its core? Unless you're arguing _all_ programming language ecosystems are rotting (or too young and niche to have an actual ecosystem), I have no idea how you're arriving at that conclusion. EcmaScript, HTML and CSS are standards that are continuously being developed and seeing updates. Browsers are now evergreen or quickly becoming irrelevant (even old IE will eventually be replaced by the evergreen Edge). My build tools are mostly Webpack and Babel, two actively maintained projects with highly active communities. My applications are mostly built around React, which is also in active development and has the full weight of numerous major companies behind it (not to mention it's being sponsored by Facebook). So I ask you, how is "the ecosystem" rotting at "its core"? Are you talking about jQuery which today can mostly be replaced by native browser APIs but is still getting updates? Are you talking about Backbone, which everyone has been moving away from for years? Are you talking about Grunt and Gulp and all the other task runners which merrily chug along on myriads of development machines? The JS ecosystem isn't rotting at its core. The JS ecosystem has no core. And it's not rot, it's compost, obsolete refuse disintegrating to give way to new development, feeding the ecosystem by releasing developers who would otherwise be stuck maintaining outdated technology.
- specialist 9y ago
  Entropy.
- edem 9y ago
  The language itself is the problem. JS doesn't even have a standard library. If you look at the documentation you can't even tell what the complexity of the `shift` operation is in an `Array`. Java on the other hand has a very well documented stdlib with all the concurrent and non concurrent data structures and utilities you can think of. Javascript is a crude tool and the fact that [it was created in 10 days](https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_JavaScript https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...) does not help it. This language has a lot of compost as you say but one can't differentiate between refuse and pristine tools (the latter might theoretically exist) just by looking at it and no one has the time to analyze all the tools he might end up using since there are so many. So you take one which has the most stars on github (like I did with [graphlib](https://github.com/cpettitt/graphlib) https://github.com/cpettitt/graphlib)) then you realize that it is crap and you end up writing one from scratch.

Well you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Don't expect quality js tools to emerge from an ecosystem which is rotting at its core.

by edem 9y ago

Well you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Don't expect quality js tools to emerge from an ecosystem which is rotting at its core.

remline 9y ago

Es6 has some nice moderate changes that can trickle up.. An infinite number of bad tools and frameworks doesn't really stop a good one from coming along anymore than all the low quality OSes and environs that had a libc and compiler stopped C.

pluma 9y ago
Honestly this entire argument sounds like "Linux is terrible because there are so many useless and terrible distros". Just use Ubuntu because that's what everybody uses. Or spend some effort looking into it and see if you end up with Debian or maybe CentOS or Arch.

pluma 9y ago

What did I miss? How is "the JS ecosystem" rotting at its core? Unless you're arguing _all_ programming language ecosystems are rotting (or too young and niche to have an actual ecosystem), I have no idea how you're arriving at that conclusion. EcmaScript, HTML and CSS are standards that are continuously being developed and seeing updates. Browsers are now evergreen or quickly becoming irrelevant (even old IE will eventually be replaced by the evergreen Edge). My build tools are mostly Webpack and Babel, two actively maintained projects with highly active communities. My applications are mostly built around React, which is also in active development and has the full weight of numerous major companies behind it (not to mention it's being sponsored by Facebook). So I ask you, how is "the ecosystem" rotting at "its core"? Are you talking about jQuery which today can mostly be replaced by native browser APIs but is still getting updates? Are you talking about Backbone, which everyone has been moving away from for years? Are you talking about Grunt and Gulp and all the other task runners which merrily chug along on myriads of development machines? The JS ecosystem isn't rotting at its core. The JS ecosystem has no core. And it's not rot, it's compost, obsolete refuse disintegrating to give way to new development, feeding the ecosystem by releasing developers who would otherwise be stuck maintaining outdated technology.

specialist 9y ago
Entropy.
edem 9y ago
The language itself is the problem. JS doesn't even have a standard library. If you look at the documentation you can't even tell what the complexity of the `shift` operation is in an `Array`. Java on the other hand has a very well documented stdlib with all the concurrent and non concurrent data structures and utilities you can think of. Javascript is a crude tool and the fact that [it was created in 10 days](https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_JavaScript https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...) does not help it. This language has a lot of compost as you say but one can't differentiate between refuse and pristine tools (the latter might theoretically exist) just by looking at it and no one has the time to analyze all the tools he might end up using since there are so many. So you take one which has the most stars on github (like I did with [graphlib](https://github.com/cpettitt/graphlib) https://github.com/cpettitt/graphlib)) then you realize that it is crap and you end up writing one from scratch.