4 ms·

Modules: one of the great programming innovations of the 1960s, first available in JS just fifty years later.

ixtli 3y ago
its my experience that you can say this for most things the non-academic community does. this isn't a criticism of them or you for saying it, but its p constant. the worst offenders in my experience are AAA game devs. ive had so many conversations where they imply they've solved some deep computing problem that was formally solved in 1954 by a set theorist or linguist heh
hombre_fatal 3y ago
This doesn't really make sense outside of "JS suxx amirite fellas?" JS had modules before ESM. ES modules try to solve different problems and offer new solutions with browsers fetching modules themselves, something other module systems don't even do. Whether a language has modules or not is just a design / ecosystem decision, not a technological one. Swift is a modern language (2014) that doesn't even have modules comparable to what Node.js introduced a 14 years ago. Yet it does little to hamper the quality of apps people are building for the Apple ecosystem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Considering JS didn't exist until the mid 90's, and it's usage was quite limited until the mid oughts, that's not surprising.
- ElfinTrousers 3y ago
  I'd say not so much because of the timing but because JS was only meant to be a crude stopgap: the scripting language they'd use for a year or two and then replace. The rest is history, the history of a huge sector of our industry built on a hilariously inadequate foundation.
  - xctr94 3y ago
    Would it be better if the language stopped evolving?
  - replygirl 3y ago
    inadequate for what? js excels far beyond its intended purpose
  - hnbad 3y ago
    That's a bit ahistorical. JS was Netscape's scripting language and was supported in both their browser and server. The name change only happened because Java had arrived on the scene and Netscape cut a deal with Sun so JS would not be seen as a direct competitor to Java, the "real" programming language for browser applications. That it was pretty much rushed out the door was more of a product of the times it was born into, namely the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft tried to push VBScript as a competitor to JavaScript and ended up copying JavaScript's implementation as JScript. Netscape desperately tried to standardize JavaScript to give it legitimacy (which is how we ended up with ECMAScript, due to the trademark limitations and ECMA being the only standards body that didn't require a lengthy application process). If you think JavaScript's history is bad, don't look too closely at HTML, a language designed so academics could share information with each other. The Semantic Web pretty much died when search engines became a thing. There's entire offshoots to XHTML that make ES4 look like a success story. EDIT: It's worth remembering not only what the world looked like that JS was born into but also how the entire Internet evolved since then. Due to JavaScript's unique position, it is heavily invested in backwards compatibility. Except for a number of security-related breaking changes and removals of experimental APIs that never caught on, code written in the early days will still run in modern browsers because it has to. This puts a lot of constraints on its design process and evolution and yet we still see the language undergo massive changes over the past years.

its my experience that you can say this for most things the non-academic community does. this isn't a criticism of them or you for saying it, but its p constant. the worst offenders in my experience are AAA game devs. ive had so many conversations where they imply they've solved some deep computing problem that was formally solved in 1954 by a set theorist or linguist heh

hombre_fatal 3y ago

This doesn't really make sense outside of "JS suxx amirite fellas?" JS had modules before ESM. ES modules try to solve different problems and offer new solutions with browsers fetching modules themselves, something other module systems don't even do. Whether a language has modules or not is just a design / ecosystem decision, not a technological one. Swift is a modern language (2014) that doesn't even have modules comparable to what Node.js introduced a 14 years ago. Yet it does little to hamper the quality of apps people are building for the Apple ecosystem.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Considering JS didn't exist until the mid 90's, and it's usage was quite limited until the mid oughts, that's not surprising.

ElfinTrousers 3y ago
I'd say not so much because of the timing but because JS was only meant to be a crude stopgap: the scripting language they'd use for a year or two and then replace. The rest is history, the history of a huge sector of our industry built on a hilariously inadequate foundation.
- xctr94 3y ago
  Would it be better if the language stopped evolving?
- replygirl 3y ago
  inadequate for what? js excels far beyond its intended purpose
- hnbad 3y ago
  That's a bit ahistorical. JS was Netscape's scripting language and was supported in both their browser and server. The name change only happened because Java had arrived on the scene and Netscape cut a deal with Sun so JS would not be seen as a direct competitor to Java, the "real" programming language for browser applications. That it was pretty much rushed out the door was more of a product of the times it was born into, namely the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft tried to push VBScript as a competitor to JavaScript and ended up copying JavaScript's implementation as JScript. Netscape desperately tried to standardize JavaScript to give it legitimacy (which is how we ended up with ECMAScript, due to the trademark limitations and ECMA being the only standards body that didn't require a lengthy application process). If you think JavaScript's history is bad, don't look too closely at HTML, a language designed so academics could share information with each other. The Semantic Web pretty much died when search engines became a thing. There's entire offshoots to XHTML that make ES4 look like a success story. EDIT: It's worth remembering not only what the world looked like that JS was born into but also how the entire Internet evolved since then. Due to JavaScript's unique position, it is heavily invested in backwards compatibility. Except for a number of security-related breaking changes and removals of experimental APIs that never caught on, code written in the early days will still run in modern browsers because it has to. This puts a lot of constraints on its design process and evolution and yet we still see the language undergo massive changes over the past years.