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There's a big difference between breaking things because they're relying on impossible-to-secure plugins and breaking things because JavaScript developers want

There's a big difference between breaking things because they're relying on impossible-to-secure plugins and breaking things because JavaScript developers want to invoke an API in a slightly different way. Regarding versioning, see the immediately preceding question in the FAQ.

Silhouette 3y ago
I read both FAQ answers. I just - with greatest respect - don't find them convincing. The arguments about completely removing the plugins were always questionable. Yes they had security problems. Now the attack surface they represented has largely been moved to the browsers themselves, which also have security problems, often of a similar nature and for similar reasons. Plugins had stopped being a vehicle for drive-by downloads and the like thanks to better browser safeguards like click-to-play long before they were decisively removed. Some of the most popular programming languages in the world behave significantly differently between major versions and have developed effective solutions to manage those differences. Sometimes those are as simple as a command line compiler flag or config file setting to specify a target language version. And of course the libraries used with many languages also frequently have to deal with complex dependency resolutions these days. I do not understand why JavaScript is special and could not adopt a similar model if the will was there.
- bakkoting 3y ago
  Browsers are much, much better at addressing security issues than Flash or Java applets ever were. There's no comparison. And even if you think that they ought not to have been removed, surely it's clear that the concerns about security for users are a fundamentally different thing than JS developers wanting a different API shape. As to versioning the language: languages like Rust and Go use editions, which allow them to making breaking changes to syntax but not to the standard library, which is what's being discussed here. Indeed Rust has several deprecated-but-unremovable things in their standard library. Python makes breaking changes to their standard library, and then people's code breaks. C++ requires you to specify the version for the entire program, which isn't viable for JS because pages mix scripts from dozens of authors, which all need to interact and to have a coherent view of the world. Not sure what other language you're thinking of. The relatively unique object model in JS, and the fact that the standard library consists of ambient properties, also makes it special; it's harder in JS than it would be in a language like Rust to detect use of a particular feature of the standard library.

Silhouette 3y ago

I read both FAQ answers. I just - with greatest respect - don't find them convincing. The arguments about completely removing the plugins were always questionable. Yes they had security problems. Now the attack surface they represented has largely been moved to the browsers themselves, which also have security problems, often of a similar nature and for similar reasons. Plugins had stopped being a vehicle for drive-by downloads and the like thanks to better browser safeguards like click-to-play long before they were decisively removed. Some of the most popular programming languages in the world behave significantly differently between major versions and have developed effective solutions to manage those differences. Sometimes those are as simple as a command line compiler flag or config file setting to specify a target language version. And of course the libraries used with many languages also frequently have to deal with complex dependency resolutions these days. I do not understand why JavaScript is special and could not adopt a similar model if the will was there.

bakkoting 3y ago
Browsers are much, much better at addressing security issues than Flash or Java applets ever were. There's no comparison. And even if you think that they ought not to have been removed, surely it's clear that the concerns about security for users are a fundamentally different thing than JS developers wanting a different API shape. As to versioning the language: languages like Rust and Go use editions, which allow them to making breaking changes to syntax but not to the standard library, which is what's being discussed here. Indeed Rust has several deprecated-but-unremovable things in their standard library. Python makes breaking changes to their standard library, and then people's code breaks. C++ requires you to specify the version for the entire program, which isn't viable for JS because pages mix scripts from dozens of authors, which all need to interact and to have a coherent view of the world. Not sure what other language you're thinking of. The relatively unique object model in JS, and the fact that the standard library consists of ambient properties, also makes it special; it's harder in JS than it would be in a language like Rust to detect use of a particular feature of the standard library.