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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

Javascript has become the defacto browser programming language, even though it's objectively awful for complex software. The only reason it's achieved it's high status is because browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple view software lockin as a competitive advantage and have actively undermined technologies they thought were threatening(java and flash amongst others). The explosion of Html5 and javascript was more of a 'nature will find a way' type development and can almost entirely be credited to Google and various web companies pushing it and making it better.

It's still a very flawed technology stack for complex web-apps though and it's very reasonable to suggest that we could do a lot better.

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> The explosion of Html5 and javascript was more of a 'nature will find a way' type development and can almost entirely be credited to Google and various web companies pushing it and making it better.

You say this with a pejorative tone, but the fact is I've yet to see a human-designed system that is as elegant or as robust as the systems evolved by nature.

Sure for relatively simple problems in isolation we can design extremely elegant solutions, but complex systems beyond the scale of one human mind become exponentially more difficult to properly design as communication overhead quickly overwhelms the capacity to reason about the entire system. Abstraction is our main tool to fight this, and it is powerful, but most abstractions are leaky, and there's always some essential and irreducible complexity that fights against encapsulation and modularity.

As long as I've been a web developer (20 years) there has been this constant drum beat of hand-wringing over the terribleness of the web and its "abuse" as an application platform, all the while its evolutionary traits as a simple, open platform which has achieved an ubiquity that no single vendor platform has ever approached. Think about it: web pages are accessible to people with any disability on almost any device in the world regardless of operating system. Yes, the win32 API is a more elegant substrate to program a GUI, but even with in the flower Microsoft's dominance it still paled in comparison to the ubiquity of the modern day web. Fixing the warts of the web is not the hard part, the hard part in designing a "better" platform is achieving adoption, that would require an act of god as there is no coalition powerful enough to make it happen through human volition alone.

Fixing the warts of the web is not the hard part, the hard part in designing a "better" platform is achieving adoption, that would require an act of god as there is no coalition powerful enough to make it happen through human volition alone.

I don't know, I remember when Flash was viewed the same way, ran everywhere and nothing would unseat it. Although I am not a huge Apple fan, I think Job's started the snowball which unseated Flash's dominance. So maybe someone or some organisation could unseat what we see as unseatable.

Flash always had its drawbacks, such as: 1. it was not a web standard, 2. it was not indexable by search bots + was not accessible, 3. needed a plug-in to run. Therefore, I don't think it was ever being seen as unseatable. It was actually quite hated in the community of web standards & accessibility-aware web developers very early on.

Don't get me wrong, I hated Flash as much as anyone else. And yes it required a plugin, but it was ubiquitous, and did run everywhere. Plus it allowed people to make rich games and apps. I even remember someone developed a DB connector that used Flash's protocols (it wasn't using Flash) to allow universal web based access to DBs (my google-fu is failing me, can't find the project now).

So regarding your points: 1: Flash everywhere made it a de facto standard 2: You win there - except in my opinion most real world examples of 5/3/JS are not accessible (which is condemnation of us devs, we have to tools to make our sites accessible but we don't (are too lazy to?) do it. 3: Fair point again, but I glimpsed a headline here on HN that said Firefox was using something else to play flash videos...

But to your main point which was drawbacks and dev hate, I think we are also starting to see that happening now with JS. There are drawbacks to JS, and some are starting to hate it. Wether or not it is enough to start a Che Guevara movement against JS I guess will unfold in the coming years.

My money is on the fact that JS is here to stay (but I am personally still hesitant to dive deep into it)- but I think that it is in the realm of possibility to remove JS and move to something 'better'. Just what that 'better' is I don't know.

> Don't get me wrong, I hated Flash as much as anyone else. And yes it required a plugin, but it was ubiquitous, and did run everywhere.

Flash was more ubiquitous than other GUI toolkits, so I'd say it was as close to the dream as any proprietary platform developer ever achieved. However it never achieved anything approaching the web's current reach in sheer breadth of platforms.

Grandparent's point is that any model of reality that doesn't acknowledge the fact that sometimes powerful actors will refuse to cooperate is a flawed model of reality.

Who's the "we" in your comment and the original article? HN readers? The programming community at large? You and anyone else reading this article are free to write a compiler for a much better language than Javascript. There is no guarantee that Microsoft or Apple or Google will not actively undermine you too if it looks like your application is becoming a threat. More likely, such a language wouldn't serve the needs of most developers, and it'd be ignored like many other brilliant research languages that cannot get popular adoption.

Tech corporations aren't dictators and developers are not powerless. There is various ways we(developers and users), can put pressure on them. Damaging their brand by raising awareness is certainly one of them.

> it's very reasonable to suggest that we could do a lot better.

Yes, and it's so damn obvious now that you'd better have something salient to add. To wit: this has been done much better by others. C'mon, the book is called Javascript: The Good Parts (cough, 2008 vintage) This post is just chock full of bizarre straw-men in the guise of actual argument:

Systems stopped using cooperative multitasking at least 20 years ago because it sucked compared to the alternative of automatic, preemptive multitasking. And yet Node.js harks back to those dark days with its callback-based concurrency, all running in a single thread.

What the heck? No comprehension of evented systems? Reactive programming, anyone? No acknowledgement of the use cases when these systems do (or do not), in fact, kick total ass? Yes, the vanilla JS nested callback thing is a bit annoying. So don't do it. Use some of those FP chops and unwind it. Maybe a fold or a monad or some categorical pocket lint. Just please let cooperative multitasking have a nice rest.

Node.js is just a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern

http://wtfjs.com

META: This is certainly the most divisive comment, vote-wise, that I've ever made. It was significantly positive last night, and is now currently hovering around zero. It's been up and down so much I really wish I could see the total vote volume.

To downvoters: now certainly this has a bit of ranty nature to it, but is it really so off the mark and off HN policy that it deserves only a downvote, and no rebuttal or reply-in-guidance? Or are some of you just using your downvotes as rebuttals? C'mon, speak up!

Funny you mention flash, since any logic in flash is done in ActionScript, an ECMAScript variant.

> …browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple…

Javascript was the language for nearly a decade before Apple shipped Safari.

Netscape shipped Javascript, but no one was necessarily locked in. When Microsoft shipped IE, they included an only somewhat compatible version of "JScript"/"DHTML" in it, with proprietary extensions added in. There wasn't even cooperation of Javascript per se, much less a "better" language to replace it.

If you think Javascript is bad for complex software, you should try C++.

Hey, they're trying with ES6!

It is not that bad without the C parts.

C++ is fine for complex software; it's bad for simple software. The problem is that it provides benefits that are irrelevant for most people, and the costs of making those benefits available is pretty high, so for the average developer, it seems stupidly complicated.

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