12 ms·

I'm not sure about this. The web is first and foremost a document platform. Adding scripting to it could cause security problems, hurt usability and destroy the

I'm not sure about this. The web is first and foremost a document platform. Adding scripting to it could cause security problems, hurt usability and destroy the reliability of this new approach some startups are trying called "web search" which promises to automate index directories. I also wonder what's the difference between Java and JavaScript, at first glance, they look very similar.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
That’s exactly what marketing said and tried to kill mocha in the crib. Engineering snuck it in anyways then they’re all about damage control. Source: I was there
bitlad 3y ago
You can basically do this in Java or Lisp or Smalltalk right? This is not going to work. No one will use this ever.
hutzlibu 3y ago
But the web can change, to allow all kinds of online applications, running in a sandbox, so no one has to install anything, but can play games, write emails, share and edit images or whatever - all in the browser in one language. Ok, we might have to tweak js a bit, to get there ..
- WhackyIdeas 3y ago
  Ground control to hutzlibu
osener 3y ago
Clearly the right approach is to embed a native plugin into webpages so that an actually responsible company can be put in charge of building high performance and secure runtime for this. Let's call it FutureSplash.
belter 3y ago
It's not like this will affect a lot these companies bottom line. Sounds like they just spent 5 or 10 days of R&D on it...
WhackyIdeas 3y ago
I can’t see the security issues you are talking about. But if there are, I’m sure it will be patched in a future release - so nothing to worry about there.
- tralarpa 3y ago
  I think they are exaggerating. They will just use it to animate some images on websites. What can go wrong? Nobody would be crazy enough to program large applications in such a slow and sketchy language.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    I don't know, the world is full of crazy people. In the end this will be used so much, that it will be heavily optimized, so people will compile their normal languages towards it. I mean, I am obviously joking, but in a crazy world anything is possible.
IMTDb 3y ago
I don't see the point of this; you can already achieve something quite similar by compiling GNU PITA (Processor of Interactive Text Activity) with J.P. Blacker patch on top of it, which is publicly available on his FTP server. Then to get interactive content; you just pipe the content of each page to the pita daemon using UNIX sockets and write the output to a file descriptor in the /dev/screen directory (just compile and mount the "interactive-wp" filesystem on /dev/screen first, of course). The only gotcha is to ensure compatibility between these components, but someone shared a compatibility matrix on IRC a while ago, Sio it's common knowledge at this point. Really these companies "innovations" are a joke.
onion2k 3y ago
The web is first and foremost a document platform. The web is what we make it. If we want apps running in browsers (say, email clients) then that's what the web will become.
withinboredom 3y ago
I don't see how this could cause any security issues. The language barely does anything. > A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. They must be joking. Who runs a server in a browser?
icepat 3y ago
I don't see what's wrong with embedding a programming language in the browser. It's light weight, and rather simple. As long as this stays in the browser, and is not also used server-side, I don't think there's much to worry about. Since it's designed to be Java like, I suspect most developers would opt to use server-side Java, and this in browser. This probably won't change.
- jaggederest 3y ago
  I don't know, Java is such a new untested language, I'm not sure anyone will choose it for CGI programming over C, or maybe something like Perl. [outside of kayfabe, Java was really first released in May 1995, only a few months before this press release, and was mostly used for applets and desktop applications (building a web browser!) - server side usage came a while later]
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    I've taken a look at Java and its standard lib and it's really bad at the kind of text processing that 99% of CGI programming is. Hell, it doesn't even have regexps! To be fair, C is even worse, but that's why we have Perl.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  > As long as this stays in the browser, and is not also used server-side It looks like this is exactly what they intend to do at some point. From the article: > A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. I don't see how this would work, tbh.
  - icepat 3y ago
    Yes, this does not make much sense to me. I will stick with Java and Perl until I see a viable reason to Go to something else. Maybe someone will create an improved version of C++ (though my skills there are rather Rusty).
jjallen 3y ago
How will this affect my beloved CompuServe subscription?
everdrive 3y ago
It might even encourage every single webpage to be a bloated, user-hostile mess.
- WhackyIdeas 3y ago
  The information superhighway won’t stand for that.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
I agree, but I wouldn't worry too much. This just adds new functionalities that weren't previously possible using straightforward documents, and may save some bandwidth and time by reducing the need for back-and-forth request/response to CGI servers for doing small calculations that could take place on the client. As this has no relevance for serving and requesting pure documents there will be no need for us to use a java-script capable web browser if all we want is to read websites.
austin-cheney 3y ago
Two things: 1) Introducing scripting to the web can introduce security concerns, but this is the wrong way to think about interconnected systems. By far the greater security concern is trust models built over anonymous connections. When you can eliminate anonymity or the security implications therein most of the security issues that arise from the availability of scripting are like wise mitigated. 2) The greatest difference between JavaScript and Java is that Java will force OOP on you, in JavaScript functions are first-class citizens, and the scope model is always lexical. I abhor OOP and completely avoid the ambiguity of inheritance and keyword pronouns when writing JavaScript. Always choose composition over inheritance. When I see people intentionally do otherwise I immediately assume they have no idea what they are doing.
- indymike 3y ago
  > keyword pronouns when writing JavaScript. This, when read using 2023 political correctness caused me to have to wipe coffee off of my laptop screen. I'm picturing HR paying me a visit because my last commit misgendered the Person object.
  - benterix 3y ago
    ...or deadnamed a deleted reference.
donohoe 3y ago
Agree, if we are to go in this direction I’d rather wait and see what Microsoft is doing with VBScript next year. It uses the COM to access elements of the environment within which it is running. That’s the future. Or Perl.
zoky 3y ago
I’m still hard-pressed to see what advantages HTTP offers over more mature protocols such as FTP and Gopher.
kakwa_ 3y ago
I'm really confused, is JavaScript just a rebranding of Java applets? maybe with some minor overlays on top of it? That sounds more like a marketing stunt to me.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Really disappointed this isn't a full Lisp in the browser. Lisp is so obviously the future of the web, so this seems like a backward step to me.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  A Lisp which used < > instead of ( ) would itegrate very nicely with HTML.
  - bokchoi 3y ago
    Ah, that's what the L is XSLT stands for!
  - kazinator 3y ago
    That existed: MDL. Well, MDL has < > conses and ( ) conses. These have a different type tag, but are otherwise identical. MDL uses that to give the two different semantics, situationally.
bazoom42 3y ago
> I also wonder what's the difference between Java and JavaScript, at first glance, they look very similar. JavaScript is a scripting language and therefore much easier to use. No slow compilation and build step, no complex and rigid type system yelling at you, no dependency hell. Just type the code in notepad and press f5 in the browser to see it run. You dont need to understand advanced concepts like classes or packages or exceptions. It is as simple to write as an Excel macro. Java on the other hand requires professional programmers, which are a lot more expensive than web designers, and less fun.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > JavaScript is a scripting language and therefore much easier to use. There are already scripting languages available. Why not just use something like Tcl which is lightweight and easily embeddable? Why re-invent the wheel?
  - bazoom42 3y ago
    If they had to chose an existing scripting language, surely Perl would be the obvious choice? Perl is designed after how humans think, where other languages force you to think like a computer.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      Perl was pretty complex and not easy to embed. Self would have made sense, as Sun already had a very good implementation.
  - jpalomaki 3y ago
    Some history can be found at least here [1] and [2]. Based on that, the original idea was to build something that was based on Scheme. Then Sun came to the picture. They already had Java and there was pressure to have something that looked like Java. Story was that you would Java for the big stuff and Javascript for more light-weight client-side tasks. That (marketing) worked out pretty well. At least for me it took years to figure out what kind of language Javascript really was. Seeing jQuery for the first time was kind of revelation. [1] https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/ https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/ [2] https://2ality.com/2011/03/javascript-how-it-all-began.html https://2ality.com/2011/03/javascript-how-it-all-began.html
cmsj 3y ago
I agree with this comment. I will now email the webmaster to ask them to update the vote count for your post because it deserves attention.
vishnugupta 3y ago
Is JavaScript a Java scripting language for terminals? Can I do #!/bin/javascript ?
blacksqr 3y ago
What the hell is an "object scripting language"? I'm skeptical, but if there's a natural mapping of JavaScript objects to HTML element hierarchies, and an easy way for JavaScript to parse structured information received from a server, I suppose it could be a good thing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sublinear 3y ago
> The web is first and foremost a document platform. I'm here from the future to tell you there's never been much difference between an app UI and a document. > Adding scripting to it could cause security problem Everyone eventually gets their shit together after witnessing the catasrophically bad security issues caused by idiots desperately avoiding javascript with even worse ideas and implementations.
royaltheartist 3y ago
Really hope no one uses this to mess up the behavior of anchor tags
bazoom42 3y ago
Btw the security problems are solved by having Java and JavaScript running in a secured “sandbox” isolated from the underlying system. So security issues will be a thing of the past.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

That’s exactly what marketing said and tried to kill mocha in the crib. Engineering snuck it in anyways then they’re all about damage control. Source: I was there

bitlad 3y ago

You can basically do this in Java or Lisp or Smalltalk right? This is not going to work. No one will use this ever.

hutzlibu 3y ago

But the web can change, to allow all kinds of online applications, running in a sandbox, so no one has to install anything, but can play games, write emails, share and edit images or whatever - all in the browser in one language. Ok, we might have to tweak js a bit, to get there ..

WhackyIdeas 3y ago
Ground control to hutzlibu

osener 3y ago

Clearly the right approach is to embed a native plugin into webpages so that an actually responsible company can be put in charge of building high performance and secure runtime for this. Let's call it FutureSplash.

belter 3y ago

It's not like this will affect a lot these companies bottom line. Sounds like they just spent 5 or 10 days of R&D on it...

WhackyIdeas 3y ago

I can’t see the security issues you are talking about. But if there are, I’m sure it will be patched in a future release - so nothing to worry about there.

tralarpa 3y ago
I think they are exaggerating. They will just use it to animate some images on websites. What can go wrong? Nobody would be crazy enough to program large applications in such a slow and sketchy language.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  I don't know, the world is full of crazy people. In the end this will be used so much, that it will be heavily optimized, so people will compile their normal languages towards it. I mean, I am obviously joking, but in a crazy world anything is possible.

IMTDb 3y ago

I don't see the point of this; you can already achieve something quite similar by compiling GNU PITA (Processor of Interactive Text Activity) with J.P. Blacker patch on top of it, which is publicly available on his FTP server. Then to get interactive content; you just pipe the content of each page to the pita daemon using UNIX sockets and write the output to a file descriptor in the /dev/screen directory (just compile and mount the "interactive-wp" filesystem on /dev/screen first, of course). The only gotcha is to ensure compatibility between these components, but someone shared a compatibility matrix on IRC a while ago, Sio it's common knowledge at this point. Really these companies "innovations" are a joke.

onion2k 3y ago

The web is first and foremost a document platform. The web is what we make it. If we want apps running in browsers (say, email clients) then that's what the web will become.

withinboredom 3y ago

I don't see how this could cause any security issues. The language barely does anything. > A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. They must be joking. Who runs a server in a browser?

icepat 3y ago

I don't see what's wrong with embedding a programming language in the browser. It's light weight, and rather simple. As long as this stays in the browser, and is not also used server-side, I don't think there's much to worry about. Since it's designed to be Java like, I suspect most developers would opt to use server-side Java, and this in browser. This probably won't change.

jaggederest 3y ago
I don't know, Java is such a new untested language, I'm not sure anyone will choose it for CGI programming over C, or maybe something like Perl. [outside of kayfabe, Java was really first released in May 1995, only a few months before this press release, and was mostly used for applets and desktop applications (building a web browser!) - server side usage came a while later]
- Sharlin 3y ago
  I've taken a look at Java and its standard lib and it's really bad at the kind of text processing that 99% of CGI programming is. Hell, it doesn't even have regexps! To be fair, C is even worse, but that's why we have Perl.
withinboredom 3y ago
> As long as this stays in the browser, and is not also used server-side It looks like this is exactly what they intend to do at some point. From the article: > A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. I don't see how this would work, tbh.
- icepat 3y ago
  Yes, this does not make much sense to me. I will stick with Java and Perl until I see a viable reason to Go to something else. Maybe someone will create an improved version of C++ (though my skills there are rather Rusty).

jjallen 3y ago

How will this affect my beloved CompuServe subscription?

everdrive 3y ago

It might even encourage every single webpage to be a bloated, user-hostile mess.

WhackyIdeas 3y ago
The information superhighway won’t stand for that.

Mordisquitos 3y ago

I agree, but I wouldn't worry too much. This just adds new functionalities that weren't previously possible using straightforward documents, and may save some bandwidth and time by reducing the need for back-and-forth request/response to CGI servers for doing small calculations that could take place on the client. As this has no relevance for serving and requesting pure documents there will be no need for us to use a java-script capable web browser if all we want is to read websites.

austin-cheney 3y ago

Two things: 1) Introducing scripting to the web can introduce security concerns, but this is the wrong way to think about interconnected systems. By far the greater security concern is trust models built over anonymous connections. When you can eliminate anonymity or the security implications therein most of the security issues that arise from the availability of scripting are like wise mitigated. 2) The greatest difference between JavaScript and Java is that Java will force OOP on you, in JavaScript functions are first-class citizens, and the scope model is always lexical. I abhor OOP and completely avoid the ambiguity of inheritance and keyword pronouns when writing JavaScript. Always choose composition over inheritance. When I see people intentionally do otherwise I immediately assume they have no idea what they are doing.

indymike 3y ago
> keyword pronouns when writing JavaScript. This, when read using 2023 political correctness caused me to have to wipe coffee off of my laptop screen. I'm picturing HR paying me a visit because my last commit misgendered the Person object.
- benterix 3y ago
  ...or deadnamed a deleted reference.

donohoe 3y ago

Agree, if we are to go in this direction I’d rather wait and see what Microsoft is doing with VBScript next year. It uses the COM to access elements of the environment within which it is running. That’s the future. Or Perl.

zoky 3y ago

I’m still hard-pressed to see what advantages HTTP offers over more mature protocols such as FTP and Gopher.

kakwa_ 3y ago

I'm really confused, is JavaScript just a rebranding of Java applets? maybe with some minor overlays on top of it? That sounds more like a marketing stunt to me.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

Really disappointed this isn't a full Lisp in the browser. Lisp is so obviously the future of the web, so this seems like a backward step to me.

bazoom42 3y ago
A Lisp which used < > instead of ( ) would itegrate very nicely with HTML.
- bokchoi 3y ago
  Ah, that's what the L is XSLT stands for!
- kazinator 3y ago
  That existed: MDL. Well, MDL has < > conses and ( ) conses. These have a different type tag, but are otherwise identical. MDL uses that to give the two different semantics, situationally.

bazoom42 3y ago

> I also wonder what's the difference between Java and JavaScript, at first glance, they look very similar. JavaScript is a scripting language and therefore much easier to use. No slow compilation and build step, no complex and rigid type system yelling at you, no dependency hell. Just type the code in notepad and press f5 in the browser to see it run. You dont need to understand advanced concepts like classes or packages or exceptions. It is as simple to write as an Excel macro. Java on the other hand requires professional programmers, which are a lot more expensive than web designers, and less fun.

throw0101b 3y ago
> JavaScript is a scripting language and therefore much easier to use. There are already scripting languages available. Why not just use something like Tcl which is lightweight and easily embeddable? Why re-invent the wheel?
- bazoom42 3y ago
  If they had to chose an existing scripting language, surely Perl would be the obvious choice? Perl is designed after how humans think, where other languages force you to think like a computer.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Perl was pretty complex and not easy to embed. Self would have made sense, as Sun already had a very good implementation.
- jpalomaki 3y ago
  Some history can be found at least here [1] and [2]. Based on that, the original idea was to build something that was based on Scheme. Then Sun came to the picture. They already had Java and there was pressure to have something that looked like Java. Story was that you would Java for the big stuff and Javascript for more light-weight client-side tasks. That (marketing) worked out pretty well. At least for me it took years to figure out what kind of language Javascript really was. Seeing jQuery for the first time was kind of revelation. [1] https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/ https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/ [2] https://2ality.com/2011/03/javascript-how-it-all-began.html https://2ality.com/2011/03/javascript-how-it-all-began.html

cmsj 3y ago

I agree with this comment. I will now email the webmaster to ask them to update the vote count for your post because it deserves attention.

vishnugupta 3y ago

Is JavaScript a Java scripting language for terminals? Can I do #!/bin/javascript ?

blacksqr 3y ago

What the hell is an "object scripting language"? I'm skeptical, but if there's a natural mapping of JavaScript objects to HTML element hierarchies, and an easy way for JavaScript to parse structured information received from a server, I suppose it could be a good thing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sublinear 3y ago

> The web is first and foremost a document platform. I'm here from the future to tell you there's never been much difference between an app UI and a document. > Adding scripting to it could cause security problem Everyone eventually gets their shit together after witnessing the catasrophically bad security issues caused by idiots desperately avoiding javascript with even worse ideas and implementations.

royaltheartist 3y ago

Really hope no one uses this to mess up the behavior of anchor tags

bazoom42 3y ago

Btw the security problems are solved by having Java and JavaScript running in a secured “sandbox” isolated from the underlying system. So security issues will be a thing of the past.