3 ms·

Being Turing-complete seems a bit overkill for a hyperlinked document platform.

mikeash 7y ago
Yes! All the replies here are missing the point completely. It’s not that JavaScript is somehow uniquely bad among programming languages. It’s that the entire idea of putting a general purpose programming language into the system was a bad idea. 99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.
- manigandham 7y ago
  The web has long-ago graduated beyond just serving up documents, and having a capable language and platform was key in enabling it. There are downsides to everything, but we cant dismiss that positives that came from it.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    The problem is that document delivery is still the main function, but the platform wants to be a fully capable app platform. Yes, it’s great that the web is capable of stuff like Google Docs. But all those capabilities are actually liabilities when it’s a news site.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      It is a fully capable platform. How it's used isn't a fault of the platform though. It seems user-agents and adblockers are applying the proper protections, just like how antivirus works on your desktop.
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        But nobody whines about antivirus and begs you (and the government) to disable it, so they can sell you.
        manigandham 7y ago
        Well the difference is ads and malware are not the same thing, but they use the same vectors. The comparison would be more like removing DRM protections vs using antivirus.
stargrazer 7y ago
wait for WebAssembly to be ubiquitous in the browser. Another turing complete language, but faster and smaller.
- rgppq112 7y ago
  In practice it will be slower and bigger. Everybody will be just compiling entire C++ frameworks to wasm. A web app needs to do something with images? Here is the entire ffmpeg compiled to wasm. Need a single widget from Qt? Here is the entire Qt compiled to wasm. I'm pretty sure nobody is going to carefully refactor existing C++ libs to select only the subset of features needed for web.

Yes! All the replies here are missing the point completely. It’s not that JavaScript is somehow uniquely bad among programming languages. It’s that the entire idea of putting a general purpose programming language into the system was a bad idea. 99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.

manigandham 7y ago
The web has long-ago graduated beyond just serving up documents, and having a capable language and platform was key in enabling it. There are downsides to everything, but we cant dismiss that positives that came from it.
- mikeash 7y ago
  The problem is that document delivery is still the main function, but the platform wants to be a fully capable app platform. Yes, it’s great that the web is capable of stuff like Google Docs. But all those capabilities are actually liabilities when it’s a news site.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    It is a fully capable platform. How it's used isn't a fault of the platform though. It seems user-agents and adblockers are applying the proper protections, just like how antivirus works on your desktop.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      But nobody whines about antivirus and begs you (and the government) to disable it, so they can sell you.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Well the difference is ads and malware are not the same thing, but they use the same vectors. The comparison would be more like removing DRM protections vs using antivirus.

stargrazer 7y ago

wait for WebAssembly to be ubiquitous in the browser. Another turing complete language, but faster and smaller.

rgppq112 7y ago
In practice it will be slower and bigger. Everybody will be just compiling entire C++ frameworks to wasm. A web app needs to do something with images? Here is the entire ffmpeg compiled to wasm. Need a single widget from Qt? Here is the entire Qt compiled to wasm. I'm pretty sure nobody is going to carefully refactor existing C++ libs to select only the subset of features needed for web.