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Almost none of the things I mentioned are solutions to 'a problem created by JavaScript' therefore your question seems deliberately misleading. An accepting co

by lhnz 9y ago

Almost none of the things I mentioned are solutions to 'a problem created by JavaScript' therefore your question seems deliberately misleading. An accepting community can be a large funnel: it doesn't need to mean that nobody improves or that there are no selection effects. More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. Babel isn't merely contributing to a 'lack of a good VM'. It's more valuable to see it as a playground and streamlined process for large-scale testing of language-level features. (It solved this problem later on. It was originally meant only to solve the problem of running modern code on older VMs.) I guess you could argue that the VM should have been complete in 1995 but what programming language has managed this? Also, I don't think that comparing JavaScript's VM to the VMs of statically typed languages is fair. You mentioned yourself that in comparison to similar dynamically typed languages it's faster. Compare apples to apples. I don't think I'm bending the truth here. There's been a lot of investment into JavaScript, and not all of the problems that have been solved are obvious or easy. At this point it is ascendant because it has effectively solved lots of problems that relate to speed of change and it has done this seamlessly on a large number of platforms. I think people look at this and pattern-match to 'first-mover advantage' or 'JavaScript has a monopoly on browsers' but neither of these things were what got us to this place: it was innovation in maneuverability. (It won't necessarily stay ascendant now that it is so easy to circumvent writing JavaScript but yet still plug into its ecosystem.)

marcosdumay 9y ago
> More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. That needs substantiation. It's not immediately obvious in any way. About Babel, notice how we never had a problem playing with language-level features that target the PC? That's the difference a good VM makes (although on the PC case, it's not virtual). Besides, you are conflating VMs and languages somehow - they have only a tenuous relation. About the speed, Javascript misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. It's more on line with Java but if you want dynamically typed languages, with PHP and Perl too. Yet, it's not any faster than PHP and Perl. It has reasonably fast runtimes - those are not an issue for the language, but are not a big selling point either. Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is viewed as a serious language is all because it has a monopoly on the browsers. It was worked on enough that if that monopoly goes away it will still be a good choice for some stuff, but it is not an stellar language, and can't be coerced into becoming one unless it can pass through a Perl5 - Perl6 level transition.
- lhnz 9y ago
  I don't think that comment requires more substantiation than yours that there are "low enough standards that newbies feel empowered without learning anything new". The more people that learn your language, the more likely it is that you will find some that can contribute to its state-of-the-art. A low bar doesn't effect people that would surpass a higher bar with ease: they still wish to learn and sate their natural curiosities. In fact, the normal stereotype of JavaScript developers as people constantly chasing new technologies and libraries is actually true, but what you are claiming is the exact opposite: "people feeling empowered without learning anything new". People are empowered and learning new things because there is a low barrier to doing so and this is exciting. > misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. > It's more on line with Java Have you actually written modern JavaScript code? I personally think it's more expressive than both Python and Ruby, and certainly much more so than Java. > Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is > viewed as a serious language is all because it has a > monopoly on the browsers. As it stands JavaScript doesn't have a monopoly on the browser. You can transpile ClojureScript, Elm, Reason, PureScript and many other languages to it. Yet -- surprise! It is still in use. Do you honestly think this is just inertia? I'd argue that it's investment in the platform itself and particularly 'innovation in maneuverability' (number of environments, speed of prototyping, backward compatible code, ease of hiring) which keeps developers using the platform. In my opinion, the existence of NPM and a broad range of environments that you can run your code on will likely mean that JavaScript would still be a productive environment even if the web was to die.
  - flavio81 9y ago
    >You can transpile ClojureScript, Elm, Reason, PureScript and many other languages to it. Yet -- surprise! It is still in use. Do you honestly think this is just inertia? No, it isn't inertia -- one important reason is that creating a transpiler to JS invariably ends up with a crippled (feature-restricted), slower version of the original language (Clojure, etc.) Thus the hope placed in Webassembly.
    - lhnz 9y ago
      People aren't choosing between those languages based on performance or avoiding any due to missing features. I've never heard of anybody doing that. People generally choose languages due to assumptions about their hiring pool.

by lhnz 9y ago

marcosdumay 9y ago

> More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. That needs substantiation. It's not immediately obvious in any way. About Babel, notice how we never had a problem playing with language-level features that target the PC? That's the difference a good VM makes (although on the PC case, it's not virtual). Besides, you are conflating VMs and languages somehow - they have only a tenuous relation. About the speed, Javascript misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. It's more on line with Java but if you want dynamically typed languages, with PHP and Perl too. Yet, it's not any faster than PHP and Perl. It has reasonably fast runtimes - those are not an issue for the language, but are not a big selling point either. Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is viewed as a serious language is all because it has a monopoly on the browsers. It was worked on enough that if that monopoly goes away it will still be a good choice for some stuff, but it is not an stellar language, and can't be coerced into becoming one unless it can pass through a Perl5 - Perl6 level transition.

lhnz 9y ago
I don't think that comment requires more substantiation than yours that there are "low enough standards that newbies feel empowered without learning anything new". The more people that learn your language, the more likely it is that you will find some that can contribute to its state-of-the-art. A low bar doesn't effect people that would surpass a higher bar with ease: they still wish to learn and sate their natural curiosities. In fact, the normal stereotype of JavaScript developers as people constantly chasing new technologies and libraries is actually true, but what you are claiming is the exact opposite: "people feeling empowered without learning anything new". People are empowered and learning new things because there is a low barrier to doing so and this is exciting. > misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. > It's more on line with Java Have you actually written modern JavaScript code? I personally think it's more expressive than both Python and Ruby, and certainly much more so than Java. > Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is > viewed as a serious language is all because it has a > monopoly on the browsers. As it stands JavaScript doesn't have a monopoly on the browser. You can transpile ClojureScript, Elm, Reason, PureScript and many other languages to it. Yet -- surprise! It is still in use. Do you honestly think this is just inertia? I'd argue that it's investment in the platform itself and particularly 'innovation in maneuverability' (number of environments, speed of prototyping, backward compatible code, ease of hiring) which keeps developers using the platform. In my opinion, the existence of NPM and a broad range of environments that you can run your code on will likely mean that JavaScript would still be a productive environment even if the web was to die.
- flavio81 9y ago
  >You can transpile ClojureScript, Elm, Reason, PureScript and many other languages to it. Yet -- surprise! It is still in use. Do you honestly think this is just inertia? No, it isn't inertia -- one important reason is that creating a transpiler to JS invariably ends up with a crippled (feature-restricted), slower version of the original language (Clojure, etc.) Thus the hope placed in Webassembly.
  - lhnz 9y ago
    People aren't choosing between those languages based on performance or avoiding any due to missing features. I've never heard of anybody doing that. People generally choose languages due to assumptions about their hiring pool.