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Comments: 531 +- Developers: Trying To Bust JavaScript Out of the Browser on Tuesday December 01, @11:12AM
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eldavojohn writes "If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity, you might want to skip this article, because Ars is reporting on efforts to take JavaScript to the next level. With the new ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the article points out a lot of positive things that have happened in the world of JavaScript. The article does a good job of citing some of the major problems with JavaScript and how a reborn library called CommonJS (formerly ServerJS) is addressing each of those problems. No one can deny JavaScript's usefulness on the front end of the web, but if you're a developer do you support the efforts to move it beyond that?"
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Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Interesting)
Dynamically typed, object-oriented, with features like lexical closures that are usually only found in advanced programming languages like Lisp, Javascript is really a great language that has gotten a bad rap.
It reminds me of the lowly tomato, a member of the poisonous nightshade family of plants, which for years was considered to be inedible. These days you can't get a salad without it. Things change when you realize how useful something actually is.
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's a great language, but it reduced modern Core i7 computers to performance of a 486, negating 15 years of computing revolution. Inability to perform CPU-intensive computations due to these dynamic types of yours, lack of threading or any other explicit or implicit parallelism support, no library facilities to modern 2D/3D graphics libraries. Javascript is a nice experimental language like so many others but it shouldn't be running 90% of mission-critical applications.
Parent
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Interesting)
- The speed issue is largely due to the crappy implementations of Javascript, which are improving due to competition among browsers. Javascript can be JIT-ed. What you probably can't do is compile it to native code and expect it to have the speed of C/C++. But then would *you* run arbitrary native binary code off the web? Sandboxing makes things slow again.
- I'll give you the lack of threading.
- 2D/3D libraries - C doesn't have one in its standard, C++ doesn't have one, in fact most don't. But you're free to implement one. It just doesn't make too much sense having a full fledged 2D/3D library in the browser, since that's where most javascript code are used in.
- experimental language, as in first appearing in 1995, used extensively for almost 15 years. Of course most people never really utilize its full power, but it's not the fault of the language
- And you use a "mission-critical application" written in Javascript running inside a web browser?
Don't ditch the language due to poor implementation and crappy users.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it's a great language, but it reduced modern Core i7 computers to performance of a 486, negating 15 years of computing revolution.
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:4, Interesting)
Your comment is a decade out of date. No modern Javascript engine operates the way you describe. They cache object properties such that property access is fast, and independent of property name length.
Your 3D code is slow for other reasons. As a hunch, I bet you're doing a lot of unnecessary string-to-Number conversion.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe more like Oxygen, poisonous in high concentrations (re: pressures).
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd instead say that Javascript is a frustrating language that's gotten too much rep. The fact that people migrate towards 3'rd party libraries to standardize simple programming operations (like jQuery / GWT) is a testament to how bad it's legacy has gotten - when trying to do 'real' work.
Sure a command-line javascript can define it's own standard and I'm confident that it can solve all these problems.. That's the great thing about standards - everybody's got one.
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Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd instead say that Javascript is a frustrating language that's gotten too much rep. The fact that people migrate towards 3'rd party libraries to standardize simple programming operations (like jQuery / GWT) is a testament to how bad it's legacy has gotten - when trying to do 'real' work.
jQuery (prototype, mootools, etc) solves shitty DOM implementations, not shitty Javascript implementations. In fact, I don't think jQuery addresses a single "lack" in Javascript-- I could be mistaken-- virtually everything, if not everything, it does is fixing DOM's bad design and browser's inconsistent implementation of it.
This is why Javascript gets a bad rap: pair it with DOM, and *any* language would look awful, because DOM is awful.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
so when is dom2 coming out?
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of Javascript's bad reputation come from the W3C's DOM. When the majority of programmers think "Javascript," they're actually thinking "Javascript + DOM," and since the DOM is so awful, they think Javascript is awful as well. Not so.
Pair Javascript with a decent library, and it's extremely powerful. Maybe not as suited for large projects as languages with namespaces, but its template system and introspection features are simply amazing. If anybody ever writes a program that evolves itself until it becomes super-intelligent and takes over the Earth, it'll probably be written in Javascript.
Correction to the parent, though: Javascript isn't an object-oriented language in the classic definition of the term... it lacks many features to make it truly OOP. Instead, it's based around object templating, which is nearly as powerful, but not the same thing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
will alert 2.
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:5, Interesting)
Javascript makes many hard things simple, and many simple things hard.
Need to find out what the user typed in box foo? While most client libraries require fairly detailed memory schemes in order to keep track of which box is which, Javascript reduces all that to getElementById(); - a win in any programmer's book!
But in the reverse, what about trimming that input? The offense to the mind that you have to use a USER DEFINED FUNCTION for trimming just boggles the mind. Sure, there are libraries for this, blah blah but still, the truth remains that there is no trim() function. The lack of any kind of meaningful class structure makes the special word "this" almost worthless because you can't be sure consistently what it's referring to. (yes, it is possible to figure it out, but why should you have to?) If you delete an array key directly with the delete command, eg: `delete myArray[4];` the length property doesn't get updated even though the number of elements in the array does. (WTF?!?!)
So javascript has its warts. Lots and lots of them. It is clearly a hacked-together language that is only successful because of its ubiquity, which is the same reason why it evolves so extremely slowly, which is why we still have to manually implement things like trim(), and why so many of us are doomed to deal with javascript with all of its warts.
Javascript, however, has been free of the browser for some time, due to the Mozilla's JS engine being modular. They call it spidermonkey, and I actually considered using it as a replacement for PHP on the server side in order to keep langauages consistent. Unfortunately, nobody's embedded it into Apache as a module (with any kind of stability) so this means that js scripts would have to run as separate executables, which causes all kinds of performance and security problems.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The absence of a trim method is not a DOM problem: I should be a method available on String.
As for the lack of this consistency, this is due how Javascript scopes references to methods. Being able to change this behaviour can be handy at times, but often not the expected behaviour.
Read http://www.alistapart.com/articles/getoutbindingsituations/ [alistapart.com] to see how apply/call can help set-up the correct binding for this and a method.
JavaScript behaves this way to support prototypal inheritance.
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:4, Informative)
If you delete an array key directly with the delete command, eg: `delete myArray[4];` the length property doesn't get updated even though the number of elements in the array does. (WTF?!?!)
That one I can't speak to... interesting if true.
Yes, delete will mull the value of an array element but leave the index. To remove an array element, use splice(), which removes AND returns the indexed element in question:
js> arr = [4,5,6,7];
4,5,6,7
js> print(arr.splice(2));
6
js> print(arr);
4,5,7
js> delete arr[1];
true
js> print(arr);
4,,7
Parent
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:4, Insightful)
JavaScript is a Self dialect with ugly syntax, a broken model for unboxed numeric values, monumentally broken semantics for closure evaluation, and no sensible second-chance dispatch mechanism. Oh, and all current JavaScript implementations are slower than the Self VM from a decade ago.
Apart from that, it's a great language.
Parent
Re:Javascript is actually a great language (Score:4, Interesting)
Javascript is too dynamically typed. In my experience, testers constantly find bugs caused by type-mismatches, misspelled variable names, or other basic things that a compiler could have detected. The next most common set of problems is that Javascript generally doesn't report errors right away: they show up 200 lines later. Suppose a variable doesn't exist when it is referenced? It just makes one up right there on the spot, and assigns it a null value. That's terrible. Then there's the null -vs- undefined mess that constantly trips-up even experienced programmers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
All strings coerce to boolean true in JS, as they do in C (with the exception of the empty string):
char* a = "false";
if (a) {
printf("a is true?\n");
}
In fact, most values coerce to true except integer zero, NaN, undefined, null and empty string.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, that isn't what the web is anymore, deal with it. Nothing at all to do with javascript.
My thoughts (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:My thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
Too educated to learn.
Parent
Getting JS out of the browser is a *great* idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
Javascript is a beautiful, elegant, small and generally well-formed language. It has a couple of warts, but what language doesn't.
However, the way that Javascript interacts with web browsers, web pages and all other things web-like is a disgusting, crufty, bloated piece of shit. The DOM bindings are horrible, as far as they go, and they're woefully incomplete. The browser deficiencies in their implementations of the DOM bindings, and the browser-specific work-arounds needed to circumvent said deficiencies, are Lovecraftian nightmares.
(The willful violation of the javascript object model for document.all in HTML5 [w3.org] (see bottom of page) is one particularly nasty example of what the web has done/is doing to Javascript. If you know the JS object model well, think about what that violation really entails, and what it would take to write that special case into a JS engine, for one particular property, of one particular object, if you happen to be running in a particular environment (browser))
Getting Javascript out of the browser would be the best thing that could possibly happen to Javascript.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>> The willful violation of the javascript object model for document.all in HTML5 (see bottom of page) is one particularly nasty example...
Not really nasty to implement at all:
get document all() {
return document.getElementById.apply(document, arguments);
}
That's interpreted code, of course, not native code. But if you're in the business of writing parsers and compilers, rolling that into native code is about a 10-minute operation.
Now... I might agree with you that it's misleading to newb
Better Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
A huge pain (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the pain of JS, like its inconsistent experience across browsers, can't really be held against it. Each browser has to implement JS according to its own interpretation of the standard, virtually guaranteeing a non-consistent experience across the board. I understand that. But what truly kills JavaScript for me is the lack of development tools and a solid reference. Debugging JS with an alert window is a horrible experience.
Again, why anyone would want this stuff everywhere is beyond me. I was shocked a long time ago when Palm Pre decided it was a good idea to use JavaScript for app development. Shocked I tell you. And look where that went. Like I said, the only reason I would consider JS "popular" on the web is because there is no other way to do client-side processing. It's literally our only choice (VBScript doesn't count).
Can your language do this (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of the comments are pointing out the problems in Javascript, and ignoring the problems in the big heavyweight languages like Java and C#.
It's not really in praise of Javascript, but a very good read is Joel's article 'Can Your Programming Language Do This?' It accurately points out a number of ways in which Java development very quickly takes up a lot of lines of code compared to more lightweight approaches. I personally prefer the light weight approach for many applications.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html [joelonsoftware.com]
Works for what it's supposed to do (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a tolerable front end language for browsers. It's not as flexible or as fast as C++, but here's a newsflash to the "I'm living in Mom's basement crowd." It doesn't have to be.
It can suck up resources and not be especially fast and not be able to manipulate pointers or be much good for creating new classes and....
(sing it with me now) IT DOESN'T MATTER AND 99.99% OF WEB DEVELOPERS DON'T CARE.
Not all languages are C++, or Ruby, or Java or anything. Nor should they be. Use the right tool for the right job.
Javascript: The Good Parts (Score:4, Informative)
This is the book that'll make you realise Javascript is OK:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748 [oreilly.com]
It's not afraid to call out the bad parts, and to show you how to work around them. That's down to a rushed standardization process.
It doesn't deal with the DOM at all - after all, that's not part of JS.
It leaves you thinking JS is pretty neat, if you use it right.
Your bias shows: You can't program shit! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity,
In other words “If you can’t program, or if you can’t tell JavaScript from Java or Python,”.
The new versions of JS are really sweet. But most “web-developers” can’t even write proper code in the old one. Which is quickly visible, if you enable strict warnings, and force the interpreter to the newest version. Most scripts throw warnings or fail after that.
I say JS and Python are on par with each other. But they use very different paradigms. JS uses prototypes. And that is what most people do not understand. See it like this: Everything is an object (including functions, which allows really powerful functional programming), everything can be written literally (including objects with functions), and everything has a prototype on which it is based and can be the prototype for other objects/prototypes.
So you build your object, and then use it as a prototype to create other objects with added functionality or changed data.
The elegance of this is, that inheriting and instantiation really becomes the same thing. And in my eyes, the less rules a language needs, while still having all the power, the better and more elegant it is.
It’s crazy how, with the newest version, I can write it nearly 1:1 like I would write it in Haskell! You can’t imagine how happy I was, when I noticed that I would practically a “scriptable Haskell in the browser”. Of course it does not have the type strictness of Haskell. But that is kinda the point.
It even has regular expression literals.
What’s a bit messy, is DOM. Perhaps because it’s a “design by committee with no own sense of reality” (= no leadership) API.
Then again, I’m all for more languages in the browser. Python, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Haskell and Java are good candidates. C/C++ and Perl are not. (Perhaps Perl 6 in 2051. ^^)
Most of you don't know what you are talking about (Score:4, Interesting)
RIAs that work well on IE and FireFox (the predominant browsers used in commercial sectors) are being developed today in JavaScript with jquery, gwt or dojo. And crappy client-side applications are being written as well. But anyone with a modicum of work experience knows that the responsibility of writing shitty applications rest squarely on the developer.
Some of the crappiest, worst code I've seen had been written on Java, C# and C++. And also, some of the clearest, most maintainable and elegant pieces of code I've seen were written in FoxPro and JavaScript. Every single language sucks in one aspect or another.
A good software professional, a pragmatic one, he looks at the language, at the tool, works around the problems and gets the stuff done with it in a clean manner.
Shitty programmer OTOH will screw it up no matter what.
And coding divas will get all emotionally attached to a given language, throwing subjective infantile rants towards whatever language they don't like recalling anecdotal memories mixed with technical impressions too superficial to be called "first-hand educated knowledge".
I don't like JS global scoping and lack of namespaces, but I do love it's object prototyping capabilities and support for functional programming. You can write some really complex client-side, browser-running systems with a brevity and clarity you cannot match with Java or C#.
That is the reality. It is a perfect tool? Nope. It is a good tool for what it is intended to? Yes. You can't get emotional against a tool, specially if you have never been able (or are incapable or have never assigned) to create a good NON-TRIVIAL application with it.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes lets put all the work on the server. The server should handle all formatting and every single error check and lets wait for the server to respond and reload the entire page to say something is wrong. Lets not have the ability to hide or move objects, because we need to reload the page over and over and over again... Never mind CPUs are Really fast and the standard Desktop has ton of memory. Lets fill up the slower bandwidth with reloading the same information over again.
Sorry your post is screaming, I am not comfortable with JavaScript and it is effecting my 7337 status. So I will insult it so I can seem like I am skilled programmer.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent up. Javascript, or ECMAscript gets a bad rap because a lot of code-pounders don't really know how to use it beyond defining a few c-style functions. It's a fairly powerful language once you understand the grammar. IE6 shoulders most of the blame for fucking it up - things that should work but need a bunch of ridiculous if(ie) incantations chase away most programmers from understanding the fundamentals of the language better. Once you realize that it's *even more* object oriented than Java(sun) then you begin to understand.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
That's unfortunate... though perhaps now you could join the ranks of those with 1337 status?
OTOH, maybe you were referring to TEAT [wikipedia.org] status, in which case... your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually wish JavaScript and other client-side browser scripting would be done away with completely,
Why?
JS is not a particularly 'good' language.
People who say this very often don't know Javascript well at all. It's Lisp in C's clothing. It's actually a surprisingly elegant language -- it has a few warts, but they are almost certainly not what you're thinking of.
Google Douglas Crockford.
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"One of the few popular languages with first-class functions"? Allow me to disagree but almost every dynamic language I know of has first-class functions.
Other languages, like C, C++, C#, also allow you to use functions as a data type.
I agree that, in some of them, their syntax does not make it easy to define functions as, for example, an argument, but you can define the function first, and pass it as an argument later if needed.
Closures are another thing altogether, but they are supported on many dynamic l
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a poor Lisp in C's clothing. Give me LET already!
Parent
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Informative)
I know exactly what a let form is. The code was not scoped so it was already on global level, declaring variables local in global scope doesn't do much. This did on global level exactly what let would in a procedural language. That is define the value for all following statements (for functional languages, all embedded statements). If you need let-embedding add a lamba expression (called function() in js), and you get nice scoped variables.
Sure.. but given JS expressive power, I dare you.. Especially compared to LISP.
If you ask for threading though, I yield ;)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to go by the thickness of Crockford's book, vs the thickness of any "Complete Javascript" book when determining how much "good stuff" the language has.
I believe there are two reasons for this:
1. Crockford's writing is concise and to the point. It assumes prior programming knowledge.
2. Crockford's book does not concern itself with the DOM
So I believe a good chunk of the extra stuff in the fatter books is "here's what a loop is", "here's what if() does", and a bigger chunk yet is about HTML and CSS.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the Douglas Crockford that wrote http://www.crockford.com/javascript/private.html [crockford.com]?
When I talk about an object oriented programming language I'm referring to a language that allows you to use the concepts of OOP in a *natural* and *homogeneous* way. I don't want to write a library and helper methods to write an OO program, I want to use the language.
It's OK if it doesn't has classes, and therefore inheritance does not have a place in Javascript, just stop trying to force it to be something that it w
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> most implementations of JS have threads, its just that its transparent to the language.
Really? Name two.
To the OP: Threads are not the only solution to concurrency. JS works will event loops.
Re:c++ is good (Score:5, Insightful)
it's just sometimes, it's a resource hog.
A bad workman always blames his tools
When you are given a screw driver to drive a nail, blaming the tool makes sense!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
it's just sometimes, it's a resource hog.
A bad workman always blames his tools
The logical fallacy in this cliche has always irritated me.
- If all bad workmen blame their tools, does it follow that all workmen that blame their tools are bad ones?
- If all dogs are animals with four legs*, does it follow that all animals with four legs are dogs?
* Excluding accidents and birth defects
Re:c++ is good (Score:5, Informative)
The logical fallacy is only because the quote has gotten distorted severely over the years. The original saying, translated to English from Old French, reads "Bad workers will never find a good tool." This version makes much more sense.
Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools [answers.com].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
so until and unless major browsers start implementing things like JIT compilation
Wish granted [google.com] (at least for chrome).
Re:javascript is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Written in C you could write an app to draw and compute the motion of tens of thousands of fucking balls at 60 fps on a modern computer.
Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "close" to C performance. Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "acceptable" performance.
Parent