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JavaScript itself is very powerful in its own domain(the DOM interactions in the browser) but most of the bloat comes from developers wanting to write JS in dif

by mrtksn 5y ago

JavaScript itself is very powerful in its own domain(the DOM interactions in the browser) but most of the bloat comes from developers wanting to write JS in different way than originally designed. 20 years of JS frameworks and at the end of the day all they do is arranging HTML boxes through slightly different code. But why so many frameworks for the exact same output? It usually comes down to code management and making the code writing closer to the mental models of the problem they intend to solve. I find it very unproductive to try to force JS to fit in every domain possible because there are already very mature languages who were designed with that domain in mind. That said, JavaScript has the power of being able to run everywhere which gives it unique advantage in actually learning and running the code written in JS. I don't have a conclusion for this. I know JS and feels great to be able to run it everywhere, especially quick and dirty solutions are almost as nice as working with PHP. However, it easily frustrates me when trying to do something better than quick and dirty and start appreciating the domain specific toolsets. I guess the moral of the story is that JS is great but let's not try to solve every problem with it.

everforward 5y ago
> JavaScript itself is very powerful in its own domain(the DOM interactions in the browser) Imo, most of this benefit comes from being effectively the only way to interact with the DOM up until WASM (and I think I read that WASM still calls out to JS for DOM manipulation). If Python had a way to manipulate the DOM via shared libraries or something, I'd wager there would be equally powerful Python libraries (ignoring security concerns). Or phrased differently, I don't think anything about the design of Javascript is uniquely well suited to manipulating DOMs, it just has a monopoly on manipulating the DOM. > most of the bloat comes from developers wanting to write JS in different way than originally designed I think a big part of this is that Javascript has become a much more integral part of websites than it was originally intended to be. My impression is that it was designed to add a little bit of interactivity, not for people to ship a nearly blank HTML file and then fill in the entire page using Javascript. That's not to say it's a bad idea, I just don't think it was designed for that and we have some warts and a lot of changes to allow us to implement that modern paradigm. I strongly suspect some form of parallelism would have been included if we had known what modern frameworks would look like.

by mrtksn 5y ago

everforward 5y ago

> JavaScript itself is very powerful in its own domain(the DOM interactions in the browser) Imo, most of this benefit comes from being effectively the only way to interact with the DOM up until WASM (and I think I read that WASM still calls out to JS for DOM manipulation). If Python had a way to manipulate the DOM via shared libraries or something, I'd wager there would be equally powerful Python libraries (ignoring security concerns). Or phrased differently, I don't think anything about the design of Javascript is uniquely well suited to manipulating DOMs, it just has a monopoly on manipulating the DOM. > most of the bloat comes from developers wanting to write JS in different way than originally designed I think a big part of this is that Javascript has become a much more integral part of websites than it was originally intended to be. My impression is that it was designed to add a little bit of interactivity, not for people to ship a nearly blank HTML file and then fill in the entire page using Javascript. That's not to say it's a bad idea, I just don't think it was designed for that and we have some warts and a lot of changes to allow us to implement that modern paradigm. I strongly suspect some form of parallelism would have been included if we had known what modern frameworks would look like.