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A 30 line javascript spreadsheet is similar for me to when I first saw Norvig's 21 line python spelling corrector (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html http://n

A 30 line javascript spreadsheet is similar for me to when I first saw Norvig's 21 line python spelling corrector (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html): this language is more powerful and expressive than I thought. I'm increasingly believing that HTML/CSS/JS in a browser is a viable common runtime. This demo does quite a lot to solidify that belief.

tracker1 13y ago
I've felt that way for 16+ years.. of course, 2/3 of that time most developers never took the time to understand/learn JS the language, and then separate that from the horrible browser DOMs in the late 90's. NN's Layers vs IE document.all ... Starting with IE5/6 (and later Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) it actually got a lot better. It's definitely nothing like IE4/NN4 days, and it looks like IE8 is finally falling off the radar, with IE9 to follow in the next couple years. It's only getting better. IE8 was really the last relatively bad browser imho. IE9 has some quirks, and IE10/11 are actually pretty nice (though IE11 is the most buggy browser MS has released since IE6, possibly more so). Yes, there are still browser compatibility issues.. but they are so few and far between for day to day use. Except for WebRTC and WebAudio, things are really solid.
- dspillett 13y ago
  > it looks like IE8 is finally falling off the radar Some are luckier than others... I suspect one of our major clients (one of the country's largest banks) will be stuck using IE8 and nothing but for the next few years at least. They only moved off IE6 recently due to it falling out of support next April, so there is a chance they'll stick with IE8 until 2019 (the year before it and Windows 7 drop out of extended support). At least our other major clients (smaller financial institutions) have started to see sense. While they are stuck on IE8 due to some ancient internal code that won't work on anything more correct that are at least rolling out Chrome on their standard desktops as an alternate choice for everything that doesn't rely on old IE bugs.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    When I was a contractor at a major bank, the standard was IE6, and movement towards IE8 was in progress (as Win7 was rolling out)... I don't know if they held at IE8 though, as most people I knew there have left, even the FTEs. It was an SPA that drove a lot of adoption/allowance to use Chrome/Firefox, so it may have well gone that direction since leaving.
    - dspillett 13y ago
      The move from IE6 to IE8 has (pretty much universally in the investment banking industry in the UK) only been over the last year or so. They are still pretty much all on XP, but new laptops are generally Windows 7 (with IE8) and I suspect Win7 will be rolling out to older standard builds (both desktop and laptop, machines old enough to not be Win7 compatible having been replaced already) as the first thing the relevant TS departments do after the Christmas/NewYear non-emergency-work freezes.
    - eru 13y ago
      What's an SPA? (I guess FTE are full-time employees?)
      - sopooneo 13y ago
        Single Page Application. There are a bunch of javascript SPA frameworks getting attention lately. Angular, Backbone, Ember...
  - timje1 13y ago
    Seconding this - some of us designing web applications / intranet apps for banks or government have to support IE8 for the foreseeable future. We're just now starting to drop IE6 support for the new versions of our products.
stiff 13y ago
The only things that are powerful and expressive in JavaScript are bastardized beyond recognition versions of ideas from Lisp, Smalltalk and Self. You get those dynamic mechanisms that we know for 50 years now (lambda expressions and runtime method dispatch, oh wow) to be useful but without learning any lessons learned in those 50 years about how to design a coherent language based on those concepts, you just get a hodgepodge of language constructs that don't add up together to form a useful toolkit. It might look nice in a 30 line program where you don't care about performance, code readability (and boy does this code look ugly) and bugs and maintenance costs. Ruby or Smalltalk have an object system for doing those kinds of things that was actually designed and not evolved by committees and corporations, so that your meta-programming doesn't have to always be only eval and .bind in various incarnations (unsafe, inconvenient and slow). I can't imagine how this thing here that makes evaluating "A1" perform a function call fits into the rest of JavaScript and why the hall was it even introduced: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/defineProperty https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... Not to mention the "with" usage on which this hack is based is actively discouraged by everyone using JavaScript as it basically mixes in the object into the current scope. In a sane language, you do .instance_eval, and you narrow the scope to whatever the object contains. I congratulate the author of this code as much as everyone for finding an unexpected and very creative use for those features, but this doesn't make them great.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  All valid points. With the norvig example, the longer I look at it the more I like python. With this js example, the more I look at it the more I like python. Sadly, I can't really run python in the browser.
  - davidbielen 13y ago
    Kinda: http://www.brython.info/index.html http://www.brython.info/index.html
    - thatthatis 13y ago
bolder88 13y ago
Increasingly? This demo is impressive, but apart from the LocalStorage, this exact same code would have worked just the same 15 years ago. The web has been a great runtime for a long long time.
baq 13y ago
wow.
robomartin 13y ago
> Norvig's 21 line python spelling corrector That spell checker is intended to demonstrate a technique but it is far from 21 lines of real code. It you look at the included modules (re and collections) you'll find THOUSANDS of lines of code. As always "I did x in n lines of <insert language>" often are really interesting learning tools but real production code isn't (or should not) ever look like these examples. No criticism of Norvig's code, it's interesting and I, too, learned something very interesting the first time I saw it.

tracker1 13y ago

I've felt that way for 16+ years.. of course, 2/3 of that time most developers never took the time to understand/learn JS the language, and then separate that from the horrible browser DOMs in the late 90's. NN's Layers vs IE document.all ... Starting with IE5/6 (and later Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) it actually got a lot better. It's definitely nothing like IE4/NN4 days, and it looks like IE8 is finally falling off the radar, with IE9 to follow in the next couple years. It's only getting better. IE8 was really the last relatively bad browser imho. IE9 has some quirks, and IE10/11 are actually pretty nice (though IE11 is the most buggy browser MS has released since IE6, possibly more so). Yes, there are still browser compatibility issues.. but they are so few and far between for day to day use. Except for WebRTC and WebAudio, things are really solid.

dspillett 13y ago
> it looks like IE8 is finally falling off the radar Some are luckier than others... I suspect one of our major clients (one of the country's largest banks) will be stuck using IE8 and nothing but for the next few years at least. They only moved off IE6 recently due to it falling out of support next April, so there is a chance they'll stick with IE8 until 2019 (the year before it and Windows 7 drop out of extended support). At least our other major clients (smaller financial institutions) have started to see sense. While they are stuck on IE8 due to some ancient internal code that won't work on anything more correct that are at least rolling out Chrome on their standard desktops as an alternate choice for everything that doesn't rely on old IE bugs.
- tracker1 13y ago
  When I was a contractor at a major bank, the standard was IE6, and movement towards IE8 was in progress (as Win7 was rolling out)... I don't know if they held at IE8 though, as most people I knew there have left, even the FTEs. It was an SPA that drove a lot of adoption/allowance to use Chrome/Firefox, so it may have well gone that direction since leaving.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    The move from IE6 to IE8 has (pretty much universally in the investment banking industry in the UK) only been over the last year or so. They are still pretty much all on XP, but new laptops are generally Windows 7 (with IE8) and I suspect Win7 will be rolling out to older standard builds (both desktop and laptop, machines old enough to not be Win7 compatible having been replaced already) as the first thing the relevant TS departments do after the Christmas/NewYear non-emergency-work freezes.
  - eru 13y ago
    What's an SPA? (I guess FTE are full-time employees?)
    - sopooneo 13y ago
      Single Page Application. There are a bunch of javascript SPA frameworks getting attention lately. Angular, Backbone, Ember...
- timje1 13y ago
  Seconding this - some of us designing web applications / intranet apps for banks or government have to support IE8 for the foreseeable future. We're just now starting to drop IE6 support for the new versions of our products.

stiff 13y ago

The only things that are powerful and expressive in JavaScript are bastardized beyond recognition versions of ideas from Lisp, Smalltalk and Self. You get those dynamic mechanisms that we know for 50 years now (lambda expressions and runtime method dispatch, oh wow) to be useful but without learning any lessons learned in those 50 years about how to design a coherent language based on those concepts, you just get a hodgepodge of language constructs that don't add up together to form a useful toolkit. It might look nice in a 30 line program where you don't care about performance, code readability (and boy does this code look ugly) and bugs and maintenance costs. Ruby or Smalltalk have an object system for doing those kinds of things that was actually designed and not evolved by committees and corporations, so that your meta-programming doesn't have to always be only eval and .bind in various incarnations (unsafe, inconvenient and slow). I can't imagine how this thing here that makes evaluating "A1" perform a function call fits into the rest of JavaScript and why the hall was it even introduced: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/defineProperty https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... Not to mention the "with" usage on which this hack is based is actively discouraged by everyone using JavaScript as it basically mixes in the object into the current scope. In a sane language, you do .instance_eval, and you narrow the scope to whatever the object contains. I congratulate the author of this code as much as everyone for finding an unexpected and very creative use for those features, but this doesn't make them great.

thatthatis 13y ago
All valid points. With the norvig example, the longer I look at it the more I like python. With this js example, the more I look at it the more I like python. Sadly, I can't really run python in the browser.
- davidbielen 13y ago
  Kinda: http://www.brython.info/index.html http://www.brython.info/index.html
  - thatthatis 13y ago

bolder88 13y ago

Increasingly? This demo is impressive, but apart from the LocalStorage, this exact same code would have worked just the same 15 years ago. The web has been a great runtime for a long long time.

baq 13y ago

wow.

robomartin 13y ago

> Norvig's 21 line python spelling corrector That spell checker is intended to demonstrate a technique but it is far from 21 lines of real code. It you look at the included modules (re and collections) you'll find THOUSANDS of lines of code. As always "I did x in n lines of <insert language>" often are really interesting learning tools but real production code isn't (or should not) ever look like these examples. No criticism of Norvig's code, it's interesting and I, too, learned something very interesting the first time I saw it.