Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

As much as i can't disagree with the choice (the realpolitik of programming has made it the most correct choice), i am saddened that the language on which the choice falls is one not chosen based on any merit, but merely due the historical accident of being the first to be implemented in a browser and having had no appreciable opposition due to browsers at the time being in hands of corporations.

In "A Deepness on the Sky", Vernor Vinge describes a future in which there is the reality of a profession called "Programmer-at-Arms", necessitated due to thousands of years of layers of indirection and cruft that will combine to make the software of that time, making it a requirement for even simple changes in a weapon system to be done by someone who can dig through all of those layers. It seems that his prediction is closer and closer to becoming reality.

View on HN

>...i am saddened that the language on which the choice falls is one not chosen based on any merit, but merely due the historical accident of being the first...

Couldn't agree more. Javascript is one of those things that I wish would just go the hell away and be replaced by something that isn't awful.

What we need is some kind of jvm-like VM binary standard that several languages can compile to. Right now that's simply JavaScript, though, but it's not very good for this purpose.

In case anyone hasn't heard of it, Asm.JS is basically trying to turn JavaScript into a similar standard. Combine that with sourcemaps in browser debugger tools and we're really close. I've been using clojurescript recently, and I can even connect a REPL to the browser and make on-the-fly changes just like we've always been able to do with JavaScript.

What I really wish someone would build is this: Create a platform-independent machine language which is designed to be translated into arbitrary other machine languages. Then put the equivalent of FX!32[1] in the browser to translate it to whatever architecture the client is running on. And have a compiler that will compile to both that and to asm.js, with asm.js being used (with consequent lower performance) for legacy browsers.

The point here is that it isn't a VM at all. It's just an intermediary platform-independent binary code. So it doesn't care what kind of language you're compiling from or what kind of hardware it's running on, but it still doesn't need a huge slow insecure runtime environment.

Basically it should do what Java originally tried to do, minus the fatal mistake Java made in tying the bytecode to a specific high level language (and thus all the changes made over the years which have made the JVM big and complicated).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

> Create a platform-independent machine language which is designed to be translated into arbitrary other machine languages.

> The point here is that it isn't a VM at all. It's just an intermediary platform-independent binary code.

PNaCl ?

Basically, yeah -- just add a target for asm.js so the same code can run in browsers that don't support PNaCl.

This is known as UNCOL, and many attempts at it have been made, dating back to the 1960s.

I made a 0.1 release of just this idea back in 2001, then abandoned it because I'm lazy: http://wry.me/~darius/software/idel/

Well, minus the asm.js, which I kind of wish I'd thought of at the time.

LLVM.

Unfortunately platform-specific stuff leaks into the intermediate representation of LLVM.

Language of choice for beginners need not mean only language of choice. If Javascript is great to get started with, great. Once someone has that down, they can still continue on to learn C, Haskell, and other more interesting languages that explore CS fundamentals & theory. Or so I would imagine, anyway?

Interestingly, it's already the Sergeant At Arms in most US legislatures who deals with things like IT, certificates, etc.

It's not just the browser, people often want to create mobile apps today and there is no standard language that works for all platforms (you can try C# with Xamarin but it is not the native choice of all the platforms). And there is not always good, still developed, standardized UI libraries for every language. Many people starting with programming want to see something on the screen and then you need this. And there is usually some people who wan't to develop serverside web code which should be supported by the same language. If Xamarin was open source or free I think it with C# would be a great way to start programming. For now Javascript works.

re: if open source

Free for open source () => http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html

re: if free

Free for students () => https://xamarin.com/student

re: if cheaper

So $25/month is too much for capability to ship on all three mobile platforms - native development - using a shared codebase written in one of the nicest languages (F#/C#) in existence? If you're a startup w/ at least three people in your team just send them a email to work something your in your favour.

I thought Java was the first to be implemented by the browser?

Maybe as a plugin, but from what i can tell Javascript was the first to be supported natively: http://www.javascripter.net/faq/javascr3.htm

Java was introduced in Netscape Navigator 2 at the same time as JavaScript. But Java was really not integrated with the html at all. It lived in its own isolated box on the page. JavaScript was integrated with html and with the browser environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava ?

I think the TCL plugin predates the Java one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com