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What is wrong with blog posts Lately I've been reading a lot of blog posts assailing a technology as though proponents of that technology think all other tools

What is wrong with blog posts Lately I've been reading a lot of blog posts assailing a technology as though proponents of that technology think all other tools are useless in all situations. Replace "GWT" and "JS" in this article with "C++" and "Assembly," and all of the points still hold. But C++ is still incredibly useful for many developers, and so is GWT. GWT largely exists because it has a reason to exist. One of its main reasons to exist is that browsers are not standards compliant, and sometimes the standards are ill-defined. A well-defined abstraction layer on top of that is very useful... right up until it's not. Sometimes you need to dig in to Assembly, and sometimes you need to dig in to JS. But quite often, higher-level abstractions get you all the way from start to finish.

vetinari 15y ago
Actually, my first thought when reading this blog post was "oh no, it's C vs. hand-tunes assembly again." We know, how that ended up.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  You know... It's in fact much more like the reverse: compiling assembly language into C. Java is a less expressive language than JavaScript. The result is that you code in the slow-to-develop/fast-to-run language and it spits out fast-to-develop/slow-to-run code.
  - oelewapperke 15y ago
    Another way of saying the same thing would be GWT: develop in a language where managing complexity is doable and well-understood, and run in a write-only language that can be run everywhere Java has lots of advantages, like coherence and interoperability between libraries that javascript lacks (never mind the actual existence of more than 5 libraries). Also GWT allows you to write run-anywhere code. These days it's pretty much a safe bet that all your code will work perfectly well on all browsers, not just the desktop ones. If you develop for mobile and don't have 500 phones, this is a blessing.

vetinari 15y ago

Actually, my first thought when reading this blog post was "oh no, it's C vs. hand-tunes assembly again." We know, how that ended up.

rbanffy 15y ago
You know... It's in fact much more like the reverse: compiling assembly language into C. Java is a less expressive language than JavaScript. The result is that you code in the slow-to-develop/fast-to-run language and it spits out fast-to-develop/slow-to-run code.
- oelewapperke 15y ago
  Another way of saying the same thing would be GWT: develop in a language where managing complexity is doable and well-understood, and run in a write-only language that can be run everywhere Java has lots of advantages, like coherence and interoperability between libraries that javascript lacks (never mind the actual existence of more than 5 libraries). Also GWT allows you to write run-anywhere code. These days it's pretty much a safe bet that all your code will work perfectly well on all browsers, not just the desktop ones. If you develop for mobile and don't have 500 phones, this is a blessing.