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Good. I could do without the JS, to be honest (I'm a little tired of pages that refuse to show me anything unless I whitelist some stupid third-party jQuery scr

Good. I could do without the JS, to be honest (I'm a little tired of pages that refuse to show me anything unless I whitelist some stupid third-party jQuery script in uMatrix), but, baby steps. When sites finally ditched their trendy Flash rewrites and went back to HTML, I thought, thank God.

Spivak 7y ago
The JAM stack the author is talking about is entirely driven by JS. The is “static” in the sense that a .dmg file is static and can be hosted on a CDN and not templated on the server.
- ehvatum 7y ago
  Jesus, why? You could write the back end in something that isn’t fucking garbage, at that point.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    shovel sellers, that's why
  - godman_8 7y ago
    I’m not a JS fan but quit with the toxicity. The proprietary logic is done with languages like Go, Rust, Python, JS, etc and built with a RESTful API in mind so the frontend can consume it. Angular, React, and Vue are built to do this well. It’s all in moderation and should be done responsibly. The downside with this of course is added complexity on all levels. However with this design maturing the complexity has reduced some or effort offloaded elsewhere (microservices, serverless, k8s.)
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    This is just empty negativity. That people use Javascript in places they aren't forced to use Javascript should make you wonder what the upsides are for them instead of assuming they cannot form any valid preferences of their own, unlike yourself. For example, Javascript is one of the few languages that actually delivers on "async everything" and has a very simple Promise abstraction (like Promise.all()), and that makes it better for me than building networked services in similar languages (PHP, Python, Ruby). It's also one of the few dynamically-typed languages with a bolt-on static type system that actually gained traction. You might not care about these things somehow, like maybe you only write C and Python because you work with embedded systems. But I think it's time to stop calling it garbage in honest conversation.
    - nostrebored 7y ago
      Maybe the problem here is building networked services (sounds like synchronous communication between components). How often is it that a well architected microservice architecture needs to do more than push data into a decoupling resource and data store and consume data from a stream or a queue? Is Promise.all( ... ) really that relevant that often? I've come to enjoy Node.js more than I thought I ever would, but it's still not something that's ever mindblowing to me, and I don't think that switching to Python would be a huge burden. With sensible tooling and contracts, neither would switching to a statically typed backend.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      Async-by-default from the perspective of the developer is one of the chief sins of JS, in this writing-JS-since-the-90s developer's opinion. I've seen and written so damn much code to work around async-by-default. Now most of the code I read is comically full of (justified!) awaits, so at least we got the sugar to fix it without so much fuss, but we shouldn't have to in the first place. Let async code surrender control, but don't continue executing the current logic unless the developer asks for that behavior. Await-like behavior by default. That would have been much saner, less bug-prone, more helpful, and easier to learn & reason about. It's the desired behavior at least 90% of the time, in my experience.
the_cat_kittles 7y ago
"i could do without the js" is an indictment of design decisions, not js. its performant as hell, and ubiquitous. its a great thing, ...what people chose to do with it is often not great, however.
geggam 7y ago
Be interesting to see if we could start charging website owners fees for them using our processing power to render their site. Something needs to be done to encourage some efficiencies given the fact it takes more resources to surf the internet and read about running a k8s cluster than it does to actually run the cluster
- p2t2p 7y ago
  You're free not to use any website...
  - geggam 7y ago
    Arguably if you are publishing content on the net you are giving it away. There are mechanisms to charge for it.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      > There are mechanisms to charge for it. Only above a certain price point. Our financial system nor our consumer culture support micropayments yet. This effectively limits the web properties that can charge users to a small fraction, so unfortunately "just charge money" isn't the widely-available solution I wish it was yet. Hell, it's more viable to charge users for your mobile client than the backing service. It's kind of the closest we have to micropayments in a way.
      - geggam 7y ago
        Then you dont have a sustainable business model. Why should I subsidize your failed model ?
        buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
        Yet you somehow think charging content providers for using your computer when they give you free content isn’t a failed business model?
kristopolous 7y ago
When flash was dying I said it was a bad thing because ads would no longer be contained in these tidy, controllable virtual machines sitting adjacent to the page content but instead would be redone in JavaScript in a huge soupy mess where the content is held hostage by ads that slide in and out of the screen and cover content, popping in and out of existence, reflowing the page, making the content jump around and disappear as terribly coded flash apps become terribly coded JavaScript modules slogging the whole browser along with it. People thought I was wrong and insane. I wish I was. Realistic assessments are always less popular than hope and principles. Flash was the good times.
- b0rsuk 7y ago
  Flash ads were trivial to block with plugins :-). And it was safe to block because usually no serious pages used Flash much except for artist portfolios.

Spivak 7y ago

The JAM stack the author is talking about is entirely driven by JS. The is “static” in the sense that a .dmg file is static and can be hosted on a CDN and not templated on the server.

ehvatum 7y ago
Jesus, why? You could write the back end in something that isn’t fucking garbage, at that point.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  shovel sellers, that's why
- godman_8 7y ago
  I’m not a JS fan but quit with the toxicity. The proprietary logic is done with languages like Go, Rust, Python, JS, etc and built with a RESTful API in mind so the frontend can consume it. Angular, React, and Vue are built to do this well. It’s all in moderation and should be done responsibly. The downside with this of course is added complexity on all levels. However with this design maturing the complexity has reduced some or effort offloaded elsewhere (microservices, serverless, k8s.)
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  This is just empty negativity. That people use Javascript in places they aren't forced to use Javascript should make you wonder what the upsides are for them instead of assuming they cannot form any valid preferences of their own, unlike yourself. For example, Javascript is one of the few languages that actually delivers on "async everything" and has a very simple Promise abstraction (like Promise.all()), and that makes it better for me than building networked services in similar languages (PHP, Python, Ruby). It's also one of the few dynamically-typed languages with a bolt-on static type system that actually gained traction. You might not care about these things somehow, like maybe you only write C and Python because you work with embedded systems. But I think it's time to stop calling it garbage in honest conversation.
  - nostrebored 7y ago
    Maybe the problem here is building networked services (sounds like synchronous communication between components). How often is it that a well architected microservice architecture needs to do more than push data into a decoupling resource and data store and consume data from a stream or a queue? Is Promise.all( ... ) really that relevant that often? I've come to enjoy Node.js more than I thought I ever would, but it's still not something that's ever mindblowing to me, and I don't think that switching to Python would be a huge burden. With sensible tooling and contracts, neither would switching to a statically typed backend.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Async-by-default from the perspective of the developer is one of the chief sins of JS, in this writing-JS-since-the-90s developer's opinion. I've seen and written so damn much code to work around async-by-default. Now most of the code I read is comically full of (justified!) awaits, so at least we got the sugar to fix it without so much fuss, but we shouldn't have to in the first place. Let async code surrender control, but don't continue executing the current logic unless the developer asks for that behavior. Await-like behavior by default. That would have been much saner, less bug-prone, more helpful, and easier to learn & reason about. It's the desired behavior at least 90% of the time, in my experience.

the_cat_kittles 7y ago

"i could do without the js" is an indictment of design decisions, not js. its performant as hell, and ubiquitous. its a great thing, ...what people chose to do with it is often not great, however.

geggam 7y ago

Be interesting to see if we could start charging website owners fees for them using our processing power to render their site. Something needs to be done to encourage some efficiencies given the fact it takes more resources to surf the internet and read about running a k8s cluster than it does to actually run the cluster

p2t2p 7y ago
You're free not to use any website...
- geggam 7y ago
  Arguably if you are publishing content on the net you are giving it away. There are mechanisms to charge for it.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > There are mechanisms to charge for it. Only above a certain price point. Our financial system nor our consumer culture support micropayments yet. This effectively limits the web properties that can charge users to a small fraction, so unfortunately "just charge money" isn't the widely-available solution I wish it was yet. Hell, it's more viable to charge users for your mobile client than the backing service. It's kind of the closest we have to micropayments in a way.
    - geggam 7y ago
      Then you dont have a sustainable business model. Why should I subsidize your failed model ?
      - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
        Yet you somehow think charging content providers for using your computer when they give you free content isn’t a failed business model?

kristopolous 7y ago

When flash was dying I said it was a bad thing because ads would no longer be contained in these tidy, controllable virtual machines sitting adjacent to the page content but instead would be redone in JavaScript in a huge soupy mess where the content is held hostage by ads that slide in and out of the screen and cover content, popping in and out of existence, reflowing the page, making the content jump around and disappear as terribly coded flash apps become terribly coded JavaScript modules slogging the whole browser along with it. People thought I was wrong and insane. I wish I was. Realistic assessments are always less popular than hope and principles. Flash was the good times.

b0rsuk 7y ago
Flash ads were trivial to block with plugins :-). And it was safe to block because usually no serious pages used Flash much except for artist portfolios.