4 ms·

I can't be 100% sure that you're joking. If you are joking, and I'm going to assume you are, you might want to be careful. Somebody will see your comment and t

• crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Not just airplane systems... airbag systems. Javascript is the future of programming.
  • KGIII 9y ago
    NuclearReactor.JS! On a more (maybe?) serious note, I remember when JavaScript first came out. Well, sort of... It was mid-1990s and I think Netscape was the first to implement it. It didn't take long before it was first used for abuse, such as spawning new windows until the target computer froze. It was just a short while before it was making cursers with tracers that followed your mouse movements. Somewhere around this time, there were the first exploits that took advantage of JavaScript. Soon, the exploits were to JavaScript itself. At the same time, there were quite a few games being done in JavaScript. I want to guess that it was just a few short years before the general consensus in the newsgroups was that it was a horrible, bloated, insecure bit of needless cruft that had no business being on the Internet. Many people agreed that JavaScript needed to die a slow and cruel death, and it was still so young... Anyhow, it has cycled through these periods of love and hate, sometimes even being love-hate, but it has still kept going. People have been actively warring against JavaScript almost since day one. Well, at least since day 1,000. Since then, it has gotten sandboxing and that helped a lot. It has been used for some truly wonderful things. It has enabled all sorts of innovation and creativity. Don't get me wrong, I still recommend people surf with JavaScript disabled by default, but I can't really argue about the functionality and the results. JavaScript has, despite the campaigns against it, survived. There have been untold exploits, countless press articles where it was either the problem or facilitated the problem, and is often used as an example of incompetent programmers gone amok. Yet, JavaScript persists. I never thought it would last this long, actually. If I'd been asked to predict the demise of JavaScript, I probably would have said the year 2000. I'd have been wrong. It is a language that seems to invoke strong emotions in the developers/tech world. You either love it or you hate it. The only other language I can think of that evokes quite so strong emotions is PHP. It really is amazing. It really is impressive to see what people have done with the language. It was Eich, right? I wonder if he knew wht JS would become? Also, it has been over twenty years. Why is it that people still regularly confuse Java with JavaScript? I see that mistake with remarkable frequency, though I didn't see it in this thread. How did JavaScript survive this long, if people still don't even know what it is? Either way, I begrudgingly admit that there's a place in the world for JavaScript. I will even go so far as to say that it's a good language for some things. Well, it is now that they have kind of got the security aspects of it dialed in. So, maybe hit is the future of programming? The future where we let any old website execute programs on our personal compute devices without any vetting, of course. If I drank, I'd toast to NASDAQ.js.
    • tomelders 9y ago
      For the job that JavaScript does, there is simply no alternative. The only thing that ever came close was ActionScript, but even that didn't didn't do what JavaScript does. There is only one programming language that embraces and enhances HTML & CSS; JavaScript. And it's a horrible language. I write JavaScript all day everyday. It's how I earn my living. But I'll admit that it's a terrible, quirky, cumbersome programming language. But then it does its job in a terrible, quirky, and cumbersome environment. The JS I write has to run in several different runtime systems. Run times that change at random, in a way we the developers have no control over. My JS code has to embrace uncertainty, unlike my Swift or PHP or Python that comes with concrete guarantees. But I know that as much as I love Swift, it couldn't do what JS does. Not as succinctly as JS. Not as effortlessly as JS. Swift isn't as street wise as JS. Swift doesn't have to put up with the crap that JS has to put up with. And so Swift can be elegant and modern. But it will never be as versatile as JS.
      • LeoNatan25 9y ago
        So keep JS on that terrible environment where it belongs. Don't try to develop desktop "apps", mobile "apps", "operating systems", "desktop environments", "airplane systems", "nuclear reactors", "[something.js]" etc.
      • goatlover 9y ago
        Java, VBScript and Dart have all been supported by some of the browsers at different times. It's not like nobody has tried to put something else in the browser, it's just getting everyone to agree to support an alternative. Looks like that will be web assembly.
• DonaldFisk 9y ago
  It's increasingly hard to distinguish satire from news reporting too, but as you point out that can work both ways.
  • KGIII 9y ago
    I've noticed Rust encroaching into this space lately. "They should rewrite it in Rust!" Many of those posts seem to be sincere. Hell, there are whole articles that are very sincere. A recent(ish) favorite was one suggesting that all C should be rewritten in Rust. Granted, they suggested doing it when you did patches and doing it piece by piece, as opposed to all at once, but they were quite serious about it. They appeared to even be serious about doing it in pieces over a period of many years. I'm not actually sure which one is worse.
    • bitwize 9y ago
      The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce is real, dude.