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>Whereas Java and C users may still have debates about where, exactly, open source projects should publish their releases, that issue is settled in the JavaScri
by lol768 7y ago
>Whereas Java and C users may still have debates about where, exactly, open source projects should publish their releases, that issue is settled in the JavaScript community
I thought Maven Central was pretty much the canonical answer in Java land. Nobody cares what tool you actually use to pull these down (SBT, Gradle, Maven..).
>What this means, however, is that to do JavaScript development “The Modern Way”, while adopting its new features, you simply must use a local transpiler toolchain
Surely this depends on the browsers your application is targeting? And presumably, the sort of feature you're using (can it be polyfilled or is it a syntax feature?).
>In 2018-2019, several things have changed about the JavaScript community. Development tools are no longer fledgling, but are, instead, mature. There are built-in development tools in all of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome browsers
I agree they're decent, but there are still cases where they struggle - particularly after code has been transpiled. I still run into issues these days where the browser is trying to show a source-mapped JS file instead of the actual bundle code which masks a real issue.
>And, for web frontends, it’s your only choice
https://caniuse.com/#search=webassembly https://caniuse.com/#search=webassembly
If you don't care about IE11 (or you polyfill), it's hardly your only choice. wasm is still far from perfect but there's no question you can start writing some logic in languages other than JavaScript, and interoperate.
>If you’re the kind of programmer who thinks, “I code in Python/Java/Ruby/C/whatever, and thus I have no use for JavaScript and don’t need to know anything about it”, you’re wrong, and I’ll describe why. Incidentally, you were right in 1998, you could get by without it in 2008, and you are dead wrong in 2018.
>To be a serious programmer, you’ll have to know JavaScript’s Modern and Good Parts — as well as some other server-side language, like Python, Ruby, Go, Elixir, Clojure, Java, and so on
This reads to me as downright patronising to e.g. embedded software engineers who might be writing hardware drivers in C/C++ day to day.
Perhaps this should read "to be a serious web developer with front-end responsibilities" (JavaScript is sufficient, not necessary on the back-end and - of course, subjectively - there are much better choices to use).
- WilliamEdward 7y agoThanks for bringing attention to WebAssembly, far from perfect but with time it could rise to become the default for front ends. Javascript's popularity was purely accidental and doesn't have to be the only option for in-built browser applications.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI tell people WASM is great but still not quite ready just yet. I think we will start to see amazing things. Even Microsofts Blazor is impresive. I cant wait to see what Python and other projects come up with in regards to WASM.
- richardwhiuk 7y agoThere's a bizarre, naive belief that all programming is web programming. It's patronising and inaccurate, but it's common among people who think Javascript is a serious language.
- paulryanrogers 7y agoNot sure who those people are. But I've programmed precessionally in C, C++, Java, and PHP; and I'd say JavaScript is the most seriously intense. Doing anything useful with it requires knowing so much more than just the language part: libraries, platform (browser, server, Electron, etc.), and the company's preferred tooling/frameworks.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoEven with just vanilla JS it can get a bit confusing sometimes. I usually spend a lot of time reading MDN when working with JS just to see if I am missing anything obvious.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoJavascript is a frustrating language. On the one hand it's more "serious" than [legacy] C, C++, Java, and Python because it had first-class functions and real lexical closures from day one. On the other, it had imprecise typing, no multiprocessing, and no access to the file system. Some of that has been fixed, but Javascript was designed by one person in a week to script web browsers and that's still painfully obvious.
- Skunkleton 7y ago> On the one hand it's more "serious" than [legacy] C, C++, Java, and Python because it had first-class functions and real lexical closures from day one. Why do closures make a language "serious"? To me languages are just languages. Seriousness is defined the problem you are solving. Are flight controls serious? Probably. Is yet another small scale CRUD app serious? Probably not. There is a lot of "serious" code written in every major language. There is a huge amount of "serious" code written in C and C++, and all of this without first class functions or lexical closures.