3 ms·

I'm both excited and terribly disappointed. I feel like webdev ecosystem after the fall of Flash took a wrong turn and missed a huge opportunity. For whatever

by zeroq 1y ago

I'm both excited and terribly disappointed. I feel like webdev ecosystem after the fall of Flash took a wrong turn and missed a huge opportunity. For whatever reason people opted for both sticking with JS and backward compatibility. I can clearly see an alternative universe where you have a browser that accepts both a <script> with JS and another, modern language, and it's up to the developer to chose if he wants to transpile/recompile the code for backward compatibility or go all in for new features. I mean Typescript is cool, but it's reinventing the wheel, we already had that with ES4 over 15 years ago and WASM is still a second class citizen for hackers.

hollowturtle 1y ago
This. And it feels so frustrating, people keep defending w3c... I'm feeling let down by specs that instead of giving me a graphic, accessibility and input api, tells me where I should use <article> vs <aside> or whatever useless stuff
- zeroq 1y ago
  I'm glad I'm not alone with these feeling. I was there when Macromedia took JS as their scripting language for animating GIFs. People soon started doing silly things and everyone realized it was not fit for the task. We had AS2 which added some syntactic sugar and was the exact same thing as early Typescript - an escape hatch that allowed you to use OOP while the resulting code was still just plain old JS. But meanwhile Macromedia worked on a whole new thing called AS3. It was codified as ES4 and it's the reason why JS had all these "private", "abstract" keywords reserved. Heck, we even had redtamarin for running AS as console! And there was Alchemy which is grandfather of WASM. We were that close to having a compiled JS++. But times were different, we were still in the middle of browser wars, and the standard was eventually scrapped because noone was interested in JS at the time. And then Apple decided to kill Flash. And for some reason the community decided to burn the library of Alexandria and spend the next 10 years on reinventing the wheel. Sure, V8 is a world wonder, no question about it, the fact that JS can run that fast is just amazing. And people finally wrapped their head around TS and realized that types are useful. Wonderful. But I really think that we've lost 10 years running in circle and producing smart looking docs while tech is slowly getting back where it was 15 years ago.
  - DarkNova6 1y ago
    It strikes me that V8's purpose is to dominate in a world with a terrible spec, much like Microsoft deal with its own office files, or how some industries suppress competition via regulatory capture. The intention might not have started out this way, but Google has no incentive to invite any technology that could loosen its dominance.

by zeroq 1y ago

hollowturtle 1y ago

This. And it feels so frustrating, people keep defending w3c... I'm feeling let down by specs that instead of giving me a graphic, accessibility and input api, tells me where I should use <article> vs <aside> or whatever useless stuff

zeroq 1y ago
I'm glad I'm not alone with these feeling. I was there when Macromedia took JS as their scripting language for animating GIFs. People soon started doing silly things and everyone realized it was not fit for the task. We had AS2 which added some syntactic sugar and was the exact same thing as early Typescript - an escape hatch that allowed you to use OOP while the resulting code was still just plain old JS. But meanwhile Macromedia worked on a whole new thing called AS3. It was codified as ES4 and it's the reason why JS had all these "private", "abstract" keywords reserved. Heck, we even had redtamarin for running AS as console! And there was Alchemy which is grandfather of WASM. We were that close to having a compiled JS++. But times were different, we were still in the middle of browser wars, and the standard was eventually scrapped because noone was interested in JS at the time. And then Apple decided to kill Flash. And for some reason the community decided to burn the library of Alexandria and spend the next 10 years on reinventing the wheel. Sure, V8 is a world wonder, no question about it, the fact that JS can run that fast is just amazing. And people finally wrapped their head around TS and realized that types are useful. Wonderful. But I really think that we've lost 10 years running in circle and producing smart looking docs while tech is slowly getting back where it was 15 years ago.
- DarkNova6 1y ago
  It strikes me that V8's purpose is to dominate in a world with a terrible spec, much like Microsoft deal with its own office files, or how some industries suppress competition via regulatory capture. The intention might not have started out this way, but Google has no incentive to invite any technology that could loosen its dominance.