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Keeping this on the frontpage will help as well :) This is a great idea. One of the reasons why JavaScript is frequently misunderstood is because if you search

Keeping this on the frontpage will help as well :) This is a great idea. One of the reasons why JavaScript is frequently misunderstood is because if you search for anything JS related you will find posts explaining how to do some DHTML thing in IE5/6 and Netscape. It's great that Mozilla considers themselves to be the patron saints of JS, but much of the recent growth in the JS community is due to projects like V8 and node. Why doesn't Joyent or Google get to host the docs on their servers? Perhaps it's a better idea to establish a Javascript Foundation that runs javascript.org or something. This approach will probably not last and then it'll be a wasted SEO effort.

srwh 16y ago
I am one who doesn't really understand javascript hype (and have used it in advanced ways), there are few types, objects are automatically converted to strings, few functions support even for the web (urlparse). I am in favor of a VM to the web, supporting more programming languages.
- jhuckestein 16y ago
  I'd be interested to know by what standards you asses programing languages. JavaScript has an admittedly clumsy and unnecessarily Java-like syntax and few built-in functions, I agree. But underneath there is a very elegant functional programming language. Who needs more built-in functions? Most scripting languages' built-in functions are just libraries written in that very language anyway. There's tons of such libraries for JavaScript. A lot of the recent hype is due to node.js, too. Node.js is (somewhat simplified) a set of evented IO bindings for the V8 JavaScript engine. Those bindings enable us to build webservers using JavaScript. JavaScript was designed to be run in an event loop without any concurrency or blocking, which makes it incredibly easy to build software the scales reasonably well. That said, I do agree that you should be able to use more languages in the browser. IIRC somebody has already ported Mono to Firefox which allows you to run tons of scripting languages in the browser. The next thing we need is standardization.
  - effn 16y ago
    Calling Javascript a functional language is quite a stretch. All native data structures are mutable, the function literal syntax is extremely clumsy, and there is no algebraic datatypes, pattern matching or TCO.
  - mcharkin 16y ago
    Having JavaScript on the server side makes me a bit weary, because of the difficulties of developing with it on the user side well mainly the no compilation/type checking and lack of concurrency. With the push to multi-processor systems concurrency is becoming much more important to take advantage of which makes me curious how does a non concurrent loop scale well (I don't know much about this node.js library). On the user side however I have learned to like it. The lack of type checking does bug me since I tend to make cludgy spelling errors which compilers pick up, but its tolerable. I do wish js had a built in type checker for development. Another driver of hype, more negative hype is GWT. But it is a bit disappointment and is a wrong approach to the whole browser independence issues. My brother and I have been working on a project for over 4 months, which initially started with using GWT and after two month of struggling with it, we threw it out, and switched to JQuerry. Our productivity instantly shot up. More language support would certainly interesting, but I agree JS standardization across browsers is a more important issue to have resolved.
    - jhuckestein 16y ago
      Taking advantage of multi-core platforms is easy. Just start multiple node processes and have the kernel take care of the rest. If you want the processes to communicate, there's a host of tried and tested IPC methods available. The advantage of this approach is that when you write a function in Javascript, it is guaranteed that no other program other than the very function you are writing will modify your data in any way. I've used GWT on a big project for about half a year. It's not over-hyped. It definitely has it's space. If you're working on a project with two people, you're just not in the market for it. GWT is all about stability, optimization and structured development. I don't want to get into too much detail here, but some optimizations that GWT gives you are impossible to achieve by writing JS code manually.
    - 16y ago
jacobolus 16y ago
If Google wants to write some better docs, that’s their prerogative. MDC has good docs that exist, today.

srwh 16y ago

I am one who doesn't really understand javascript hype (and have used it in advanced ways), there are few types, objects are automatically converted to strings, few functions support even for the web (urlparse). I am in favor of a VM to the web, supporting more programming languages.

jhuckestein 16y ago
I'd be interested to know by what standards you asses programing languages. JavaScript has an admittedly clumsy and unnecessarily Java-like syntax and few built-in functions, I agree. But underneath there is a very elegant functional programming language. Who needs more built-in functions? Most scripting languages' built-in functions are just libraries written in that very language anyway. There's tons of such libraries for JavaScript. A lot of the recent hype is due to node.js, too. Node.js is (somewhat simplified) a set of evented IO bindings for the V8 JavaScript engine. Those bindings enable us to build webservers using JavaScript. JavaScript was designed to be run in an event loop without any concurrency or blocking, which makes it incredibly easy to build software the scales reasonably well. That said, I do agree that you should be able to use more languages in the browser. IIRC somebody has already ported Mono to Firefox which allows you to run tons of scripting languages in the browser. The next thing we need is standardization.
- effn 16y ago
  Calling Javascript a functional language is quite a stretch. All native data structures are mutable, the function literal syntax is extremely clumsy, and there is no algebraic datatypes, pattern matching or TCO.
- mcharkin 16y ago
  Having JavaScript on the server side makes me a bit weary, because of the difficulties of developing with it on the user side well mainly the no compilation/type checking and lack of concurrency. With the push to multi-processor systems concurrency is becoming much more important to take advantage of which makes me curious how does a non concurrent loop scale well (I don't know much about this node.js library). On the user side however I have learned to like it. The lack of type checking does bug me since I tend to make cludgy spelling errors which compilers pick up, but its tolerable. I do wish js had a built in type checker for development. Another driver of hype, more negative hype is GWT. But it is a bit disappointment and is a wrong approach to the whole browser independence issues. My brother and I have been working on a project for over 4 months, which initially started with using GWT and after two month of struggling with it, we threw it out, and switched to JQuerry. Our productivity instantly shot up. More language support would certainly interesting, but I agree JS standardization across browsers is a more important issue to have resolved.
  - jhuckestein 16y ago
    Taking advantage of multi-core platforms is easy. Just start multiple node processes and have the kernel take care of the rest. If you want the processes to communicate, there's a host of tried and tested IPC methods available. The advantage of this approach is that when you write a function in Javascript, it is guaranteed that no other program other than the very function you are writing will modify your data in any way. I've used GWT on a big project for about half a year. It's not over-hyped. It definitely has it's space. If you're working on a project with two people, you're just not in the market for it. GWT is all about stability, optimization and structured development. I don't want to get into too much detail here, but some optimizations that GWT gives you are impossible to achieve by writing JS code manually.
  - 16y ago

jacobolus 16y ago

If Google wants to write some better docs, that’s their prerogative. MDC has good docs that exist, today.