My gripes with JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

My gripes with JavaScript

ironjs.wordpress.com

60 pointsfholm44 comments

The other problem I would see is obvious if you continue with something like the following logic: All successful languages passed through a phase in which they had a broadly similar list of problems. How did they escape from that phase? Because somebody had the power to move the language forward. Somebody (or small set of somebodies) could say "yes" to that idea and "no" to the other idea, and implement them, and have them out for use in a matter of months, gather feedback on the results, and after ten years of repeating that, create a credible platform.

Javascript's root problem is that there is nobody who plays that role. The language has now been around for ~15 years, but it has hardly changed in the meantime. Not zero, I know that, but compared to the advances that any other language made over the same period of its life, Javascript has hardly moved at all. Not since Netscape lost the ability to unilaterally move the language forward by virtue of having the de facto only implementation has the language been able to move much.

So not only does the language have problems, right now, there is no effective path for those problems to be fixed in any reasonable period of time. We know this, because js.next shouldn't be "something we hope to see in a few years" but rather something that should have been done ~2002/2003, if the whole improvement process wasn't so broken.

(BTW, remember to separate "the language" from "the bindings". XMLHTTPRequest was not a Javascript change, for instance, just a new binding that all browsers had.)

Even the standardization process is slow, somewhat disconnected from implementation, and is still essentially focused on fixing syntax problems that have been dangling for a decade now. If js.next somehow successfully manifests in the next few years, we still have a lot of problems in the library department, for instance.

Server-side JS will probably face a decision point at some point in the not-very-near future, where the decision will have to be made as to whether it sticks as close to client-side, browser JS controlled by a effectively-leaderless process running at vanishing fractions of the rate of improvement of any other language, or if it runs off to start creating its own improvements, probably by paving over the cowpaths. I actually favor the latter, because it would create some set of people who can say yea or nay, restore an actual feedback loop, and create progress which could then be propagated back to clients as appropriate.

Very well put, pretty much agree with it completely.

The fact that everything you said is true makes JavaScript an even more amazing language. How many languages could survive 15 years without change and still remain relevant? And not only relevant, but expand their influence?

Certainly this is mostly due to its unique position on the browser, but the language had to be flexible enough to fill that role and more. That's amazing.

I agree, except that "without change" is a bit strong. Still, the basic structure is all there from the beginning, and while warty it has managed to support some non-trivial apps. I'd count it a win overall for the author, in a very tough field.

IMO, it accomplishes this not as much by being good, as by being a parasite that infects web browsers. At that, it is so good that some people think the DOM and JavaScript are in a symbiotic relationship.

Yes, that is tongue-in-cheek, but without JavaScript, web browsers would have found another language; without web browsers, JavaScript would long have been forgotten.

> IMO, it accomplishes this not as much by being good, as by being a parasite that infects web browsers.

My memory is a bit foggy, but I recall Microsoft throwing a bunch of things at the browser in the beginning. You can specify the language in the script tag. VBScript anyone?

It wasn't like JavaScript didn't have competition ... it just won a very long time ago.

In my memory, JavaScript won because it had market penetration, it did not get market penetration because it won.

It had market penetration because it was included with Netscape Navigator.

Yes, it also was good enough at that time, but almost anything would have been, in a time where a ten-line script was huge. I do not think that it would have won against say VBScript if the latter would have been available on the same set of browsers.

Microsoft threw one other language into Internet Explorer, and as far as I can recall didn't push it any harder than JavaScript. No other scripting language was ever implemented in any other browser. To call VBScript a competitor is being overly generous. JavaScript was really the only option for DHTML.

Huh? It's the only language that works on browsers. That's how it got 'amazing'.

> How many languages could survive 15 years without change and still remain relevant? And not only relevant, but expand their influence?

I can think of one other, and for the same reason: make. Both languages are still around because it's near impossible to replace them, no matter how much they may suck. They aren't timeless, they're calcified by being a part of some infrastructure that exists on millions of machines.

There seems to be agreement that Javascript is a messy language which is popular by default: it was included in Netscape, then other browsers picked it up. Now we're stuck with it.

I realize this would be very difficult and introduce horrible compatibility issues for a while, but sometimes I think, "what if we could start over?" What if Chrome and Firefox started supporting Python or Ruby or a custom, well-designed language for web scripting? Could it gain enough momentum to replace Javascript?

Actually, the easiest candidate would be for browsers to start natively supporting Coffeescript. But imagine a "dream team" designing a language just for the web, from scratch: Douglas Crockford, John Resig, Guido van Rossum, Yukihiro Matsumoto...

Is this a "it's crazy but it just might work" scenario, or is it just crazy?

If we started over, we should pick a VM, not a language.

Some kind of flexible bytecode implemented across browsers would be fantastic, and you could always implement a fallback interpreter in javascript (or if feeling fancy, a decompiler).

Isn't Javascript a flexible bytecode?

Well, yes, but it comes with all the overhead of being a (partly) flawed language. Having a bytecode that allows, for instance, optional static and dynamic types would be much more direct than relying on type inference or separate native APIs (as are being introduced). Of course we have javascript now, so pragmatically languages should be compiled to it if we want them, but if there were to be an additional web bytecode, there would be many areas for improvement in terms of performance and safety.

JavaScript is a programming language that compiles to bytecode. It can be treated as object code, but it is a very different and higher-level thing than the term "bytecode" generally denotes.

Calling JavaScript "flexible bytecode" is like saying that all Turing-complete programming languages are the same, or that all objects capable of driving a nail into a piece of wood are equivalent. It's true in a very facile way. JavaScript can be treated kind of like bytecode, and all Turing-complete languages can be treated as a simulation of a Turing machine, but the details that these rough descriptions miss are more numerous and more significant than the details that actually went into forming the generalization.

JavaScript is a programming language that compiles to bytecode. It can be treated as object code, but it is very different and higher-level thing than the term "bytecode" generally denotes.

Yes a VM would be nice. Or LLVM + native client, "portable native client", Google is (was?) working on this in Chromium.

LLVM code with access to the DOM would be fine by me. Security would probably take a while to audit.

"The LLVM code representation is designed to be used in three different forms: as an in-memory compiler IR, as an on-disk bitcode representation (suitable for fast loading by a Just-In-Time compiler), and as a human readable assembly language representation. This allows LLVM to provide a powerful intermediate representation for efficient compiler transformations and analysis, while providing a natural means to debug and visualize the transformations. The three different forms of LLVM are all equivalent. This document describes the human readable representation and notation." http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#abstract

Producing a truly language-neutral VM would be an interesting goal, one that no-one's really got that close to achieving. (I think Microsoft's got closest.) Making it a compact wire format to boot would be... challenging.

Ultimately, a VM is just another language with lousy readability.

I see your point, but I think a VM spec comes with an implicit promise that it is OK to develop languages as opposed to the "why don't you just program in what we give you?" mantra.

I agree its a very hard problem. If I was starting from scratch I would probably look a lot more on vector operations than someone would have 10 years ago. Plus the manner of parallelism a person choses would seriously influence language implementors.

I would not consider that a dream team considering the languages/libraries they have produced.

You think jQuery, Ruby and Python are subpar?

Why, and who would you pick?

Not crazy at all, especially if is a VM that can host multiple languages. Hm... What would be even more interesting is a VM that can be configured form the server.

1. User opens a page with scripts in LanguageX. The page links to some kind of VM configuration file. 2. Browser loads that file, which enables it to parse LanguageX. Browser caches that file. 3. From now on, the browser can execute scripts in LanguageX.

Although, this particular idea might be the case when too much flexibility would lead to issues in the long run.

Chrome's ative code plugin NaCl lets you do this - there is a Tcl implementation using it so far, but no reason why there should not be others.

But NaCl in its current state is limited to a specific platforms, which is a big problem for a web app. Do you know if portable NaCl ever got anywhere?

Actually haven't seen anything for a bit. You are right we do need this too...

His main point: "there are a couple of critical problems with JavaScript that prevents it from ever being a viable alternative as development platform for server application development."

But then he goes on to list things like "Lack of language defined modules and namespaces" (which it has in common with COBOL, C, and PHP), "null vs. undefined" (JS has eight kinds of nothingness — '', false, null, undefined, NaN, 0, [], and {} — as opposed to a usually slightly smaller number, although Python has nine: '', None, [], {}, (), NaN, 0, 0.0, and False), etc.

I think he has failed to prove his point.

I used to hate JS. In fact, like the over-opinionated teenager I was I wouldn't waste any decent opportunity to make this known to my friends and the rest of the world: "Real hackers use C, Haskell, Python or LISP!1". But then as I started doing design work for web, I inevitably came in contact with JS, and lots of it. And hey, you could actually build stuff with this shit. Then, being as obsessed as I am with aesthetics and thus coding style and best practices, I found out that it's actually possible to write good (looking) programs with JavaScript. Add some CoffeeScript and underscore to the mix, and I could even write them with pleasure.

This touching lifestory isn't meant to convince you that JS is any good, but it should illustrate why/how certain individuals come to join the dark side.

JavaScript is definitely very easy to mess up, but if you follow best practices, I think it can actually be a pretty nice language.

I'm sure you'll be happy to know that all your gripes are de-griped in js.next (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:harmony - and strawman) - and with the speed of browser upgrades they'll hopefully be here the "reasonably close" future. Hopefully.

I'm well aware of js.next/harmony/whateveryouwannacallit. Come back to me in 10 years when it's implemented everywhere and everyone that was on an old version of browser X has upgraded to one with those features.

Or use a tool that compiles js.next to lowest-common-denominator-javascript.

Yay a dynamic language with a compiler step.

Python has a compiler step - source files (.py) are compiled into bytecode (.pyc) files. It just happens transparently. Doesn't make the language less dynamic IMHO.

Smalltalk, one of the seminal, dynamic languages has a compilation step. It happens inline everytime you save a method.

Lisp can both be dynamic and compiled.

Many dynamic languages---Python, Ruby, et all--on JVM or CLR have a compilation step. They compile to byte code that the VM then runs.

http://code.google.com/p/traceur-compiler/

"Hopefully" indeed -- I had a lot of hope for ECMAScript 4 back in 2007, and look how that turned out.

As with most "next gen" web browser technology (for whatever your 'current gen' may be, back to Netscape 2.0), until I see it actually shipping in a majority of browsers I will remain skeptical.

The author strikes out at the "same language on the server and client" claim, which I think is a bit unfair. one of the great things about node.js for me is that it is (mostly) js, so I can crank it open and understand what's going on - this is especially true for libraries. I know js pretty well (and most of the syntax hacks), so this is pretty straight forward. If I try and do the same thing with django or rails, then I find myself investing serious amounts of time just understanding the syntax (the splat operator is a good example). Using the same language (not necessarily the same environment) that you already know on the server does have genuine benefits, even if you do have to treat it differently.

Javascript is a really lousy language thrown together in two weeks or so.

What ideally should happen is browsers should expose the VM and an entry point for interpreters to use and configure JS on the VM. That way other languages could be used against the VM-in-browser.

I suspect Google is trying to move in this direction, but IDK.

i never thought that one day i will be the quy who posts this: try coffeescript, it really really helps (i would not believe it at first, either)

I'm not a fan of CoffeScript, it fixes the wrong problems. It's not the syntax that's the REAL issue, it's the fragmentation, lack of module system, etc.

CoffeeScript doesn't do much to fix the bad bits -- it's still JavaScript, after all -- but it does make the good bits way more fun.

i agree, the biggest fix of coffeescript is not the syntax ( i never saw the JS syntax as the issue), the biggest fix / benefit of CS is:

   Everything is an Expression (at least, as much as possible)

a lot of the hassles with JS just disappear with this "small" change (if applied extensivly)

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