Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript
-
'The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it,' says JSON creator Douglas Crockford • DEVCLASS
Best thing we can do to JavaScript is retire it: JSON creator Douglas Crockford
I guess at least he's not a nobody. I had never heard of his proposed language before:
Has WebAssembly been going anywhere? Has anyone seen it in the wild?
-
@boomzilla said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Has WebAssembly been going anywhere? Has anyone seen it in the wild?
Yes.
-
@dkf hmm...so that's sqllite running in the browser? Using the user's local file or what?
-
Yeah, no. We like to shit on JS, and it markedly deserves being shit on. But the language is only one part of it. It's the internets ecosystem that is a putrid garbage pit. Always has been. By all means, let's ban JS and create more of the same garbage in a slightly odd looking syntax. The industry is looking out for itself. True believers in never-ending innovation and progress will never be out of work as long as they're ready to dive in the pit headfirst and with a shit-eating grin.
Doesn't matter what language you would pick for client-side scripting. In a matter of minutes incorrect implementations, custom implementations and implementations that do something that didn't need to be done will spring up, together with repos full of "I found it useful" or "this was fun to make" by semi-autistic stumblefucks.
And in the end you're still left with HTML and CSS being a covid fever dream of an INT 20/WIS 2 drunken donkey.
-
@boomzilla said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Using the user's local file or what?
I dunno. I know that access to the local system is heavily restricted by the wasm sandbox, and I know that SQLite can run using an in-memory database, but beyond that...?
*experiments a bit...*
Hmm, it seems that it has mounted
/fiddle.sqlite3, but that's in some sort of virtual space since none of the roots of drives are writable on this machine.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
True believers in never-ending innovation and progress will never be out of work as long as they're ready to dive in the pit headfirst and with a shit-eating grin.
Can always find another steaming pile to be the new hotness. That's what the cattle shed is for.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Doesn't matter what language you would pick for client-side scripting. In a matter of minutes incorrect implementations, custom implementations and implementations that do something that didn't need to be done will spring up, together with repos full of "I found it useful" or "this was fun to make" by semi-autistic stumblefucks.
tl;dr You can npm in any language.
-
@boomzilla said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Using the user's local file or what?
I bet it's either completely in RAM or in localStorage, which Stephan has been previously interested in and used in Fossil's wiki editor page and elsewhere.
Edit: they use emscripten's
FS.createDataFile, which isn't documented well (or even at all), but seems to end up in RAM, as I see no non-default filesystem initialization.
-
This post is deleted!
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Yeah, no. We like to shit on JS, and it markedly deserves being shit on. But the language is only one part of it. It's the internets ecosystem that is a putrid garbage pit. Always has been. By all means, let's ban JS and create more of the same garbage in a slightly odd looking syntax. The industry is looking out for itself. True believers in never-ending innovation and progress will never be out of work as long as they're ready to dive in the pit headfirst and with a shit-eating grin.
Doesn't matter what language you would pick for client-side scripting. In a matter of minutes incorrect implementations, custom implementations and implementations that do something that didn't need to be done will spring up, together with repos full of "I found it useful" or "this was fun to make" by semi-autistic stumblefucks.
And in the end you're still left with HTML and CSS being a covid fever dream of an INT 20/WIS 2 drunken donkey.
I would even say that JS is mostly not the problem. It is a simplish language for quick hacks that can be fairly easily transpiled to for more complex work. And that's being done and most devs I know are at least using typescript. With the transpilation also taking care of injecting appropriate shims so the result runs even on old, ancient, or if desired, antediluvial browsers.
The ecosystem around it is the problem and, due to requirements for backward compatidebility, it cannot really be fixed.
-
@boomzilla said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Excellent choice of name there.
Otherwise … it boasts capability-based (to do anything, you need a reference to an object that does it, i.e. a capability), which … well, JavaScript is too. The concurrency model is single-thread with event loop, message passing between processes by some other name … which sounds pretty much like JS with WebWorkers.
From quick look I don't see any actual benefit.
-
@Bulb said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Yeah, no. We like to shit on JS, and it markedly deserves being shit on. But the language is only one part of it. It's the internets ecosystem that is a putrid garbage pit. Always has been. By all means, let's ban JS and create more of the same garbage in a slightly odd looking syntax. The industry is looking out for itself. True believers in never-ending innovation and progress will never be out of work as long as they're ready to dive in the pit headfirst and with a shit-eating grin.
Doesn't matter what language you would pick for client-side scripting. In a matter of minutes incorrect implementations, custom implementations and implementations that do something that didn't need to be done will spring up, together with repos full of "I found it useful" or "this was fun to make" by semi-autistic stumblefucks.
And in the end you're still left with HTML and CSS being a covid fever dream of an INT 20/WIS 2 drunken donkey.
I would even say that JS is mostly not the problem. It is a simplish language for quick hacks that can be fairly easily transpiled to for more complex work. And that's being done and most devs I know are at least using typescript. With the transpilation also taking care of injecting appropriate shims so the result runs even on old, ancient, or if desired, antediluvial browsers.
The ecosystem around it is the problem and, due to requirements for backward compatidebility, it cannot really be fixed.
There's two problems: one is that programming things to run in browsers involves working with some genuinely horrible APIs. What people wish to do with browsers has grown over the years and very much in fits and starts, so there's a huge legacy of stuff that didn't always work out as intended and often received hurried hacks to stem yet another security failure. It's really ugly.
The other is node and npm and all that Augean Stable.
-
@dkf said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
programming things to run in browsers involves working with some genuinely horrible APIs
… is a problem of those APIs, and they'd be just as horrible if the language used to call them was different.
@dkf said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
The other is node and npm and all that Augean Stable.
… and that's problem of the ecosystem, not of the language either.
Well, this one is partly problem of the language, specifically of its very limited standard library. But that is again because browsers started as very limited environments that didn't want to carry a big runtime, not of the language itself.
This can also be improved without discarding the language itself. What this would require would be the major framework authors to agree one one library where they'd collect all the basic utility functions and backward compati(de)bility shims so people wouldn't feel the need to reimplement them over and over.
Which wouldn't stop some from still doing that, but you get that in Java and .нет and Ruby and Go and Python and Rust and … all other languages. Every package repository in the universe contains a lot of half-baked broken utility packages.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
repos full of "I found it useful" or "this was fun to make" by semi-autistic stumblefucks.
What you need is fully-autistic stubblebums.
-
@Bulb can we replace
Not to be confused withbyReadily confused with? The current implementation is literally wrong and only works via idiomatic confinement....
-
@Bulb The homepage looks like it's been around forever, but this is the first that I hear of it.
OK, I mostly stopped caring about it at this point. The only reason I'm mildly curious still is because the webpage is ... usable. It doesn't seem to be full of javascript bullshit. The color scheme is a bit questionable, but I'd rather deal with that than the modern Web 3.0 BS that almost all other pages out there have. (No hamburger menu, no touch shit, no things sliding in or out when scrolling down, no ads, ... just a webpage.)
-
@Bulb said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
I have used one of those languages (the one without a capital letter). I am not sad that I no longer use it.
-
@Bulb said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Well, this one is partly problem of the language, specifically of its very limited standard library
Ding ding! E has no standard library of its own. Instead it's a bastardization of a very old Java, which would serve only to confuse both Java and non-Java programmers. And make Oracle lawyers giddy.
This Cuckford fuck needs to be bitchslapped into another continent for even drunkenly suggesting that all that crap is something remotely worth considering, and I now feel dumber for knowing that it exists
-
@Applied-Mediocrity sounds like somebody drove a dump truck full of either money or crypto up to their house.
-
@Gribnit There's no need for any external incentive. People like that are highly motivated as it is. They do it, because:
- It's fun (chiefly to them), but only until inconvenient stuff (like design or usage problems) arise or until the next best thing springs to their hyperactive braincells.
- They genuinely believe they're helping. The result doesn't matter. It's the process. They mistake doing for not doing. A bunch of nose-picking Ralph Wiggums flinging their snot at the walls, and among them all some pieces will eventually stick.
I used to hold intelligent people like that - not just computer scientists, but anyone who actually went and did shit - in high regard, whatever their walk of life. As years go on, I find myself more and more despising them for being gifted with bucketfull of ability to create all sorts of shit, but with a thimble worth of self-reflection on:
- Whether whatever they create would stand the test of time
- Whether it needed to be done in the first place.
- And for being overly proud not to pull the plug while there's still time.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity the parenting thread is
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
They mistake doing for not doing.
Oh dear. They could face a fine.
-
@Gribnit said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
@Applied-Mediocrity sounds like somebody drove a dump truck full of either money or crypto up to their house.
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
@Gribnit There's no need for any external incentive.
Did you miss the part about
the secure distributed persistent language for capability-based smart contracting
Insert
as needed.
-
@topspin It appears that smart contracts were invented quite a bit before the digital monopoly money. As far as I care to understand, it's some publicly-visible code (and therefore it assumes it can be independently verified) that runs when two (untrusted) parties decide to do business. That is to say, there's nothing smart about it. Blockchain in theory made it so that such contracts are immutable, and shitcoin systems based on that made it so that contract verification is incentivized by handing out shitcoins to those who do.
Nothing on that site has been updated for ages, and many links are dead, which makes me think it all happened (and was abandoned) well before the cryptofuckery.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity The core problem lies in the fact that verifying code of any complexity is very difficult, and verifying that something excessively complex does the right thing in the face of hostile financially-motivated attack is... not at all easy, especially as the people you're asking to verify it might be the attackers.
And then it's all based on shitcoins so you've got more layers of insanity.
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
That is to say, there's nothing smart about it.
Yeah, but remember, a la Internet of Shit, "smart" just means that it's controlled by one or more computer programs.
-
@dkf it’s a dumb idea to begin with:
Contracts are interpreted by lawyers, and then the lawyers will argue about stupid edge cases we didn’t think of. Let’s replace that with code instead.Now the edge case you didn’t think of is “I lent you $3bn, how the hell am I supposed to owe you money now?!”, and no lawyer arguing that that’s clearly not what the contract said is going to help you.
-
@topspin said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Let’s replace that with code instead.
-
@topspin said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
@dkf it’s a dumb idea to begin with:
Contracts are interpreted by lawyers, and then the lawyers will argue about stupid edge cases we didn’t think of. Let’s replace that with code instead.Now the edge case you didn’t think of is “I lent you $3bn, how the hell am I supposed to owe you money now?!”, and no lawyer arguing that that’s clearly not what the contract said is going to help you.
Well, that's the reason why good rules / laws are not overly specific - you thus cover 99% of all cases easily and the remaining 1% can be adjucated in court. This means that munchkins who think they're very clever because they say
the law calls it
fooso we'll call itbareven though it's the same thing and thus we are not subject to the law because we named it differently!are not able to weasel through the cracks.
-
@boomzilla said in Re: The Quixotic Ideas Thread - Retiring Javascript:
Yeah, but remember, a la Internet of Shit, "smart" just means that it's controlled by one or more computer programs.
Written by the people who appear on the front page.
