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"Always bet on JS" is complete nonsense: http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 It does those th

"Always bet on JS" is complete nonsense: http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/#74 It does those things poorly, and at great expense. Eich did one thing, in 10 days, that was market positioned such that it became ubiquitous, and he's been banging that drum ever since -- to everyone's detriment, given how much power over technical direction he wielded at Mozilla, and how much impact Mozilla had on the web pre-Chrome.

pcwalton 11y ago
"Always bet on JS" is short for "There have been dozens of challengers to JavaScript over the last 20 years, and they have all failed to gain traction". What part of that statement is incorrect?
- teacup50 11y ago
  That's not what he's actually saying there; that's a list of technical bullet points, not market adoption. However, even if we talk about market adoption; how is Firefox OS holding up against iOS, Android, and Windows? > What part of that statement is incorrect? "Always bet on JS" from Brendan Eich really meant, for 16 years, starting in 1998 and during the time that Firefox was most influential over the future of the web: "I'm never going to bet on anything other than JS". It's a uselessly self-fulfilling declaration when its stated by a (now former) browser vendor executive.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > That's not what he's actually saying there; that's a list of technical bullet points, not market adoption. The point is that if JS couldn't do these things, it would be eclipsed by a competitor. It instead grew the ability to do those things, and its competitors never gained widespread adoption. > However, even if we talk about market adoption; how is Firefox OS holding up against iOS, Android, and Windows? In terms of languages on the Web, JavaScript has always won. It's clear at this point that the Web isn't going anywhere, even though mobile apps are important.
    - teacup50 11y ago
      > The point is that if JS couldn't do these things, it would be eclipsed by a competitor. It instead grew the ability to do those things, and its competitors never gained widespread adoption. REALLY?? JS can't do concurrency by any objective performance measure against systems providing shared state concurrency; how is a competitor going to eclipse it when the lowest-level syscall interface available to target is JavaScript? > In terms of languages on the Web, JavaScript has always won. It's clear at this point that the Web isn't going anywhere, even though mobile apps are important. It ought to be indicative of something that the web is faltering in market segments where programming languages do more than move DOM elements around.
      - pcwalton 11y ago
        > REALLY?? JS can't do concurrency by any objective performance measure against systems providing shared state concurrency https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to-parallel-javascript/ https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to-p...
        14paninta 11y ago
        That's a blog post on an experimental approach from 2015. Where is the competitor that could replace JS because JS didn't support concurrency over the past 15 years while the entire world adopted and leveraged SMP and multi-core hardware?
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> It does those things poorly, and at great expense. Does it? So far it seems to be remarkably successful at these things.
BrendanEich 11y ago
Yawn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673 Oh no, I've been caught, called out on my Throne of Skulls on my Skull Island again! Yes, I had so much power over all the people working on Mozilla, I clouded all their minds with my superpowers. And post-Chrome, I still do, since apparently in spite of Chrome, your hero, villainous-me managed to kill Dart as a 2nd VM-based language in browsers -- even in Chrome. Mwahahahah!
- qdot76367 11y ago
  While this story keeps getting posted again and again, I'd like to step in and provide some first hand experience here instead of just claims, hearsay, or obviously biased opinion. I had the... experience of working next to Brendan Eich for a while. His Throne of Skulls is no joke and I have no idea how it got past either HR or the ergonomics coach. I kept cutting myself on the damn thing when I'd bump against it, had to keep a first aid kit at my desk. We didn't even know where the skulls came from either, but more kept appearing mysteriously each day. The laugh was annoying too. I'd be sitting there trying to work on the monolith of doom (which was actually the name for multiple technologies, but no one could decide which was doomier so we just called them all that) and all of the sudden, it's evil laughter time. Nothing breaks concentrating on code like a roar of pure malevolent guffawing. I'm sure many engineers at startups can sympathize. Much like the rest of this comment thread, I have no idea how this much of the web happened around this man. -- Web Henchman #1982587

pcwalton 11y ago

"Always bet on JS" is short for "There have been dozens of challengers to JavaScript over the last 20 years, and they have all failed to gain traction". What part of that statement is incorrect?

teacup50 11y ago
That's not what he's actually saying there; that's a list of technical bullet points, not market adoption. However, even if we talk about market adoption; how is Firefox OS holding up against iOS, Android, and Windows? > What part of that statement is incorrect? "Always bet on JS" from Brendan Eich really meant, for 16 years, starting in 1998 and during the time that Firefox was most influential over the future of the web: "I'm never going to bet on anything other than JS". It's a uselessly self-fulfilling declaration when its stated by a (now former) browser vendor executive.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > That's not what he's actually saying there; that's a list of technical bullet points, not market adoption. The point is that if JS couldn't do these things, it would be eclipsed by a competitor. It instead grew the ability to do those things, and its competitors never gained widespread adoption. > However, even if we talk about market adoption; how is Firefox OS holding up against iOS, Android, and Windows? In terms of languages on the Web, JavaScript has always won. It's clear at this point that the Web isn't going anywhere, even though mobile apps are important.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    > The point is that if JS couldn't do these things, it would be eclipsed by a competitor. It instead grew the ability to do those things, and its competitors never gained widespread adoption. REALLY?? JS can't do concurrency by any objective performance measure against systems providing shared state concurrency; how is a competitor going to eclipse it when the lowest-level syscall interface available to target is JavaScript? > In terms of languages on the Web, JavaScript has always won. It's clear at this point that the Web isn't going anywhere, even though mobile apps are important. It ought to be indicative of something that the web is faltering in market segments where programming languages do more than move DOM elements around.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      > REALLY?? JS can't do concurrency by any objective performance measure against systems providing shared state concurrency https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to-parallel-javascript/ https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to-p...
      - 14paninta 11y ago
        That's a blog post on an experimental approach from 2015. Where is the competitor that could replace JS because JS didn't support concurrency over the past 15 years while the entire world adopted and leveraged SMP and multi-core hardware?

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

> It does those things poorly, and at great expense. Does it? So far it seems to be remarkably successful at these things.

BrendanEich 11y ago

Yawn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554673 Oh no, I've been caught, called out on my Throne of Skulls on my Skull Island again! Yes, I had so much power over all the people working on Mozilla, I clouded all their minds with my superpowers. And post-Chrome, I still do, since apparently in spite of Chrome, your hero, villainous-me managed to kill Dart as a 2nd VM-based language in browsers -- even in Chrome. Mwahahahah!

qdot76367 11y ago
While this story keeps getting posted again and again, I'd like to step in and provide some first hand experience here instead of just claims, hearsay, or obviously biased opinion. I had the... experience of working next to Brendan Eich for a while. His Throne of Skulls is no joke and I have no idea how it got past either HR or the ergonomics coach. I kept cutting myself on the damn thing when I'd bump against it, had to keep a first aid kit at my desk. We didn't even know where the skulls came from either, but more kept appearing mysteriously each day. The laugh was annoying too. I'd be sitting there trying to work on the monolith of doom (which was actually the name for multiple technologies, but no one could decide which was doomier so we just called them all that) and all of the sudden, it's evil laughter time. Nothing breaks concentrating on code like a roar of pure malevolent guffawing. I'm sure many engineers at startups can sympathize. Much like the rest of this comment thread, I have no idea how this much of the web happened around this man. -- Web Henchman #1982587