More Info On Google's Alternative To JavaScript 247
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Last week the news came in that Google is supposed to unveil 'Dart,' a new programming language for browser-based apps. Now an internal email from late last year describes this project as the 'high risk/high reward' path [of Google's browser development strategy]. Apps in this new language will run in a VM on browsers that support it, and can be translated to JS for other browsers. 'Performance, developer usability, and ability to be tooled' are the main characteristics of the language."
The email notes that Google will be working on ECMAScript Harmony in the near term, but they describe the project as ultimately doomed by "fundamental problems" with ECMAScript. It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.
they should just create GLang (Score:3)
and make you code anything for their services in GLang so that they will be their own part of the internet separate from the open one
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then raise prices significantly.
That's debatable. The pricing model changed, and it's likely more expensive, but also clearer and potentially cheaper.
Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning.
Disclaimer: I contribute to dm-appengine, a DataMapper (for Ruby) layer for Google App Engine. It's part of why people can run Ruby on Rails on JRuby on App Engine.
But I think dm-appengine alone makes a compelling case that you don't have to code from the beginning unless you've done something fantastically stupid. DataMapper has backends in everything from sqlite to Oracle, from RDF to IMAP
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Or does your .NET code run as is on Linux?
I'm not a programmer, nor a shill, but isn't that what Mono does?
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Yes, although rarely unmodified (in my personal experience trying to get a few small utilities that I'd written). Getting even simple .NET software to run on Mono requires that you either developed with Mono in mind from the start, or you "port" your code to Mono. You need to work around bits of the .NET framework that Mono doesn't support, work around Mono bugs (obviously the same bugs don't exist in Mono and Microsoft's implementation), figure out solutions anywhere you used Windows API calls (.NET has so
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But strangely, naming himself "North Korea" seems to be pretty honest about his dishonesty.
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I know. Kinda weird. I suspect it might have to do with him leaving his first comments in the North Korea thread.
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No published docs, no information about the API's
So how do developers know how to write code that works in AppEngine?
The APIs are infact documented.
The APIs have in fact been copied and Google actually hosts the code (though they only host, don't think they have any other involvement than it sitting on their servers)
http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ [google.com]
Pretty much the same result as with .NET isn't it.
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Now I know you're either utterly fucking retarded, or really just shilling for one of Google's major competitors. You don't need to know the backend to port your project. All you need to know is the APIs of the new system, and do some work. Just like for every other platform project. Don't like it? Write your own platform.
And would you say this same thing about Microsoft and their Office file formats? "Don't like MS Office file formats? Write your own and don't support them!" Google has seriously brainwashed you. They do all the same bad things Microsoft, Facebook and many other "bad" companies do but you're too clueless to see it.
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It's probably a misunderstanding. He thinks Google is sitting on some goldmine, with their appengine, not giving any love to the community. Given how slow appengine runs, and how long it took them to even untangle the fact that it is slow as a bubble-sort implemented in Ruby sitting on a virtual Windows machine on a shared Pentium IV, Google is probably just embarrassed to release it. /exaggeration
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No, only one of those things should be free: the one that is infinitely reproducible at no cost/time/effort.
-yawn- (Score:5, Insightful)
Until I actually get my hands on the language, no amount of hype is going to do anything for me.
Besides which, CoffeeScript has got to be stealing their thunder. I have to wonder if they aren't regretting developing Dart yet.
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CoffeeScript is also fundamentally flawed by putting semantics into unprintable characters.
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Anything that replaces Javascript will also be a security concern, because it must include at least as much functionality.
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Surely a space is the *easiest* character to print.
Google: call it Hype (Score:2)
Until I see some sample code, that's the name I'll give it.
Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.
Yeah? How many free license programming languages have you released and continued to support?
As a developer, I love to learn a new language. I write a few simple programs in the new language. I explore what advantages and disadvantages that language has and then I put it in my toolbox. If a problem comes along that I must fix, I select the best tool for the job from said toolbox. I don't know how any sane developer could get by any other way -- there is no silver bullet programming language.
The more tools I have at my disposal, the more effective I am. So shut your hole. I don't want people to stop exploring new languages just because it hurts your feelings that the market might fracture and you might have to -- *gasp* -- learn something new!
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Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.
The software industry will never become as established and professional until this attitude disappears, we need masters of things, not continual change to something else.
Now, I don't have too much problem with a new language, but the bar for adoption really needs to be set very high to avoid the "chan
Well You're Missing Out, Man (Score:3)
Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.
I don't know what to say other than I feel really sorry for you if you're a developer. I grew up coding C/C++ and had I only had your attitude, I never would have used LISP, PROLOG, Java, Ruby, etc. Could I be some badass C/C++ developer if I had never been "sidetracked" and "not getting things done"? Maybe.
But -- at the risk of being modded down as a shill -- I submit to you a recently launched site [patternizer.com] I coded with a friend. He did the canvas stuff, I did the backend. I could have picked any solutio
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I've learned a fair few languages - which reinforces my point that we don't need loads more. It seems that every week there's a new language (or framework or development paradigm) that's supposed to be a silver bullet. Guess what, they never are. What they do achieve, is to draw you away from getting better at the 'old boring' stuff while you learn how to do the new - and then you ave to spend longer than you think mastering the new anyway.
There are better ways to achieve what you need, by adding functional
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Then elaborate for those of us who are clueless. What is it about Ruby on Rails which automatically implies that anyone choosing it for anything doesn't have a clue?
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You can't possibly be a top-notch developer. Any good coder out there is just a bit hampered by the use of a new language in a new project. Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax. APIs are more difficult, but then again, the slowness in developing against a new API wears off
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Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax.
Languages that differ only in syntax are a bit boring.
The Pragmatic Programmer suggests you learn a new language every year. Not to the extent that you're fully proficient in it and know the APIs inside out, but to the extent that you grasp the core concepts. To be worth learning, the language should have new concepts -- but that's pretty common.
Often a little tinkering in a language with some new paradigms, or just a shift in emphasis, can help you improve your programming style in whatever language you us
Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer. Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.
It's very rarely you need a programming language to do just one thing, maybe they go into specialty or research projects but anything commonly used has to be a swiss army knife. Most of the time you want to ask "Can I add another tool to this knife?" not design an entirely new dedicated knife for that purpose. There's a place to mix products for a "best of breed" solution, but languages are not it. Your narrow choice of language is likely to fail as the project expands and it really needs other sets of functionality.
If you want to see a prime example of that, look at VBA projects that have run out of hand. Quite probably it wasn't such a bad choice for the original task, just tack on this little bit to Excel and it works. Then it grows and grows and all those limitations get very limiting and you're forced to rewrite everything. That's what happens with other narrow languages too, if you go beyond that scope it's very good at things falls apart. Not to mention all the indirect effects like the available employee pool and the complex skills required to take over.
That is why there's a very significant drop-off in languages. I'm not saying you should try making a square peg fit a round hole, but very often the languages you, the team and the company knows and is familiar with beats trying to get everyone up to speed on a new language. But that goes for everything, should you work within the system to improve it or outside the system to overthrow it. I guess it all depends on how broken the old system is but people have a tendency to idealize the system on the drawing board.
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What you describe, i.e., the dirty snowball effect happening to smaller systems as they get inflated, doesn't necessarily need a narrow programming language for it to occur. It occurs quite frequently in C and even hardware. To be fair, put yourself in a salesman/manager shoes. You have a perspective client, but it is only one. You want to give them what they want but you cannot afford a brand new development to do it. The customer relationship might blossom into big money later but you cannot know that now
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The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer.
If your screwdriver came with a lifetime warranty, then it is a hammer.
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Your comment is so well-written irony that I can not decide if you sincere in what you say, or cleverly trolling for the other side of your argument. When you are arguing for (what seems to be) more languages merely for the sake of more languages, and presenting as evidence how you personally like to dabble in every new language... well, that incites a backlash to your argument.
Google is very interested in bandwidth memory and power conservation. Google apps use a specific subset of Javascript, and they kno
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Google has credibility and trust... they're not Microsoft
Really? Cause the first thing I thought when I read this story was 'wow, this feels a lot like a Microsoft move I've seen before'.
Re:Editorial Piece Angries Up My Blood (Score:4, Funny)
You just have another half-assed way of raping the hardware
Nah sugar, its not like that. My software takes your hardware on a smooth journey through vermont's verdant landscape, over covered bridges, skiing in the Alps, before ascending to the heights of Kilimanjaro before leaving this planet in our own space ship destined for planet love. You've got twelve cores,honey and I'll caress each one lovingly as I romance your pci flash.
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And Dart sounds to me like saying: people should switch to IPv6 because its much better than IPv4, only IPv4 addresses aren't running out in this case.
Wouldn't it be a huge effort to port all the javascript web to a new language? Look at whats happening with IPv6, and its a much more pressing matter...
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No one has decreed that Dart must exclude Javascript, nor has anyone suggested that IPv6 engineers have been taken away from their pressing task to work on Dart. Your arguments are all false arguments, crafted to support your initial reaction but not really relevant to the issue.
Lua would be better (Score:5, Interesting)
Lua [lua.org] is very Javascript-like already except it's very small, simple, clean, and fast. Much faster; LuaJIT [luajit.org] is incredible.
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Lua [lua.org] is very Javascript-like already except it's very small, simple, clean, and fast. Much faster; LuaJIT [luajit.org] is incredible.
LuaJIT is not much faster anymore.
LuaJIT gets to about 2-3X slower than the fastest gcc, while the latest JS engines (V8 with CrankShaft, SpiderMonkey with TypeInference) get to 3-5X slower than gcc. That's still a significant difference, but the JavaScript engines are also improving faster. In a year or so the difference will have vanished.
Those numbers are also a little misleading. They are mainly simple benchmarks, where LuaJIT's tracer is phenomenal. But if you take a complete program, with a lot
And when JS suddenly seems viable (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting that this should come about when Javascript seems (to me) to be undergoing quite a surge.
The community has carved out a set of practices that makes Javascript pretty satisfying to work in -- Crockford's efforts, the require/export conventions etc.
Callback oriented programming habits learned in the browser with jQuery (etc.) have shown that Javascript lends itself quite well to that style of programming. Underscore has promoted a functional style.
Node.js seems to be more popular than forebears such as Twisted, presumably because of all those JS-in-the-browser programmers who can apply their callback habits to Node.
CoffeeScript is there for people who want a more expressive syntax. ... and just as people are coming around to the idea that JS isn't that bad after all, Google says "nah, it's irredeemable"
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Whether or not Google's problems with Javascript are reasonable, it's perfectly understandable that now is the time that they would start caring so much about the future of JS. We're starting to really push the envelope, and when you do that, the shortcomings often rear their ugly heads much more dramatically.
Dart or Dash? (Score:3)
Re:Dart or Dash? (Score:2)
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Brightly (Score:2)
How does this affect our cloud IDE (Brightly)?
Brightly will enable building any web application in V1 using today’s Javascript plus the additions in Harmony. As soon as it is ready, Brightly will support Dash as well. We expect that the more prescriptive development aspects of Brightly that will come on line in the future will be more Dash focused.
We expect Brightly itself to be the first application written in Dash.
Does Backwards Compatibility Matter? (Score:3)
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Backwards compatibility is not just browser support, it's also the hundreds of JS libraries that don't exist for Dash/rt. It would be nice if it was designed to be interoperable with existing codebases.
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Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Javascript is something of an accidental success. As with many languages before it, its users valiantly cope with its flaws and do their best to dress up the squalor they live in, but it's not funny for Google anymore. They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them. In fact the story of the last few years has been the quiet proving out of the "extra keystrokes for correctness" paradigm, from simple assertions (including "type assertions" aka good old fashioned strong typing) to unit tests to highly complex integration tests of harrowing complexity.
If I understand correctly, Google already writes much of their JavaScript in an intermediate language that adds certain features. They have long needed a compile step anyway for compression/"obfuscation" and I suspect it was a natural outgrowth of that. This appears to be another step in the evolution of that development pipeline.
There are many interesting developments brewing in the browser these days. I wish the browser guys luck, because I think have just a little longer to get their act together before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem. A modern scripting language is only part of the price of admission to staying relevant as a platform.
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Javascript is something of an accidental success.
Just like PHP, MySQL, Apache, HTML, Linux, the web or the internet itself for that matter. The technology of the web is a giant happy accident and it's really quite amazing it all seems to work as decent as it does.
I'm not saying this situation is perfect and improving upon it would be bad. I'm just saying Javascript isn't any worse than all the other popular technology that makes the web tick.
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It is worse. Quite a bit worse than emerging alternatives. So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it. Google has said so as well, and they know a thing or two about client-side scripting. PHP was originally quite simple in implementation, but it was purpose designed from the very beginning for its primary use to this day - a scripting and template language for dynamic website development. MySQL was directly in
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I know it's a bit pedantic to distinguish between the DOM and Javascript, but I think it's important to do so here.
One of the ways "Javascript: The Good Parts" made JS look OK, was to exclude the DOM from the book altogether. Most people seem to agree that the DOM is a bit of a mess.
One of the things that makes jQuery popular is that it wraps the DOM's methods with something altogether more usable and consistent across browsers.
Your image rollovers example, for example, to me seems all about the DOM and lit
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These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client
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I think this is all patently false. There are some really wonderful things about JavaScript. There were some pretty awful incompatibilities between the DOMs of major browsers, and there were/are some inadequacies in the capabilities afforded to JavaScript. However, none of these are reasons to knock the language itself. You haven't named any flaws in JavaScript as a language, and there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well. Try doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does in Python, or Java
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I'm not saying there aren't issues with JavaScript. I'm just saying that it's not a terrible language, and the only arguments you have given against it are red herrings. Whether I am intellectually behind or whether the first JavaScript implementations were terrible are entirely inconsequential.
And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?
The "largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications" are quite possibly Firefox and Thunderbird. The difference is that the intellectually backward Mozilla developers want to see Java [jsperf.com]
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Code to maintain
High on cocaine
Google is ready, time to take heed
Cruft up ahead
Hacks left behind
Google, release something before I lose my mind
What exactly is wrong with javascript? (Score:2)
It seems to be taken as a given in this document that Javascript is unusable.... But there is no explanation of why this is the case (except perhaps for google's business needs) - what exactly is the problem with it? Performance is quite good these days thanks in large part to google's chrome folks. Few languages are easier to use, but it is still quite powerful.
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Off the top of my head:
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Pressed "post" too soon.
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Performance: Current javascript engines are as fast as they get for an untyped language. There isn't much more you can do to speed it up. Even optional type annotations would open a large number of potential optimizations.
Tooling: For large projects, not having much type information is painful. Refactoring code becomes a guessing game (some tools do it better than others).
Then add optional type annotations. You don't need a new language to do it.
Load time: You have to compile javascript each time a page loads. This adds some latency that could be minimized with a proper
JS compilation is very fast. Usually, the time it takes to load the JS is a bigger issue. However, the availability of an intermediate bytecode representation is unrelated to the semantics of the language itself. You could implement this on top of JS without a problem.
Lack of integral/decimal numbers: This might not seem like much of a problem, but handling money with only floating point numbers is painful. Also, things such as WebGL would benefit from having better ways to deal with raw data.
Again, you could add these on top of JS. If the only problem with JS is that it's missing features, the obvious solution is to add those features, not to throw out ever
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It is probably faster to take a chance and build an entire new language unilaterally, than gaining consensus with all the players to get the right set of modifications to a well known language (standard committees are a pain in the proverbial arse).
Since they are planning to make their language to be able to cross-compile to Javascript, t
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... and node.js makes a virtue of single-threadedness. Maybe that's something to hold onto.
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This is false.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_web_workers [mozilla.org]
Supported by Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome 3+, and IE 10.
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... until you need to deal with half a cent.
Or apply 1.3% interest to an account balance of $100.34 ...
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Theres a few annoying quirks around the duck typing ( e.g. 01234 gets treated as an octal number, bloody stupid decision)
typeof is useless
The class system is a bit klunky, but I'd far prefer it to something like Java where OO mandatory and you soon end up abstractFactoryFactoryGetter'd up the wazoo.
There is no native include directive.
But most of the problems are with a certain browsers inconsistent use of the DOM, dodgy standards support and bizarre bugs that never get fixed.
Re:What exactly is wrong with javascript? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It seems to be taken as a given in this document that Javascript is unusable.... But there is no explanation of why this is the case (except perhaps for google's business needs) - what exactly is the problem with it? Performance is quite good these days thanks in large part to google's chrome folks. Few languages are easier to use, but it is still quite powerful.
While I am not quite as aware of the problems in JS/EcmaScript as Google is, from my own extensive JS coding I can tell you that it is a pain writing JS to work on a multitude of browsers, namely because of how fractured the DOM environment is - especially when you consider supporting Internet Explorer. Getting everyone on a common DOM is itself a big enough challenge - but would very well be worth it. (That is, browser specific DOM should not be relevant to JS writers which should be able to stick to a wel
More than one dart needed (Score:2)
The language can be as great as you want. It doesn't matter if it is not supported by _all_ major browsers out there. Javascript support is probably less broken than CSS support, and you can do something and expect it to work in most browsers, most of the time. It took a long time to get there. The community is starting to build up, even using the language for server-side stuff (node.js).
When introducing a new language, don't just tell me how awesome it is, tell me your long-term plan on how and why most pe
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Of course, maybe they could use some trickery and have the language compiled to .js (in addition to having its own VM) just so legacy browsers can still load a dart app and run it as js.
This is exactly what they are doing.
Embrace, Extend and Extinguish? (Score:2)
what happend to "GO" as java alternative? (Score:2)
Don't panic (Score:2)
Besides, Microsoft will fight this all the way.
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
Whether the compiler checks that the types match, that there will be overflow, that you're doing signed vs unsigned comparison - it's up to the compiler and its developers. Clearly, one compiler can have more features than the other one. To access those new features, the compiler needs to see syntactic constructs in
And given Google's tendency to throw away... (Score:2)
projects when they get bored, tell me again why I would invest > zero seconds of my precious time on this?
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Actually, it's having been burned by that very thing that makes me no longer trust companies that can afford to fuck over their developer base without consequence. De facto standards like Java and Javascript, despite their flaws, aren't going to disappear because a marketing VP at Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. wants to get his bonus this year by cutting support for [insert programming language or standard here].
We are Google... (Score:2)
and we are.. "The knights who say NIH!!!"
(Not Invented Here)
as far as rejecting ECMAscript 4
Doing same as M$? (Score:2)
When ooxml came out, M$ was wanting to come out with their own version, could this be the same thing here, where they want to have more control and be the more prominent company out there to follow for these new standards
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at least Go has a better syntax than Haskell ;)
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It isn't really interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
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The "fundamental" problem from Google's perspective is Javascript's lack of typing. They want a language with optional typing and think that the ECMAScript 4 route isn't viable.
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Right, because we all know C is the be-all and end-all of programming languages.
Oh wait, it's not. In fact, it's a fairly archaic, cruft-ridden effort at "portable assembler", with not too much to offer in terms of a standard library.
I really think we can do better in the search for an improved browser-based programming language. We've learned quite a bit in the forty years since C was invented.
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Yes, we've learned to enough to come up with JavaScript and VisualBasic.
-dZ.
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I thought real programmers use Assembly... or was it Fortran?
-dZ.
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Look up Google Native Client. They tried a variant of C in sandbox as well.
What I hope is that Dart has a Hindley-Miller type system, and some sort of ridiculous type magic guaranteeing safety. Oh, and is simple, neat, and damn efficient.
I'd consider a pony as well.
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The usual: people whining about the language not conforming to their favorite paradigms.
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Let's skip the ass dance and hear what these fundamental problems are, and how to solve them.
Here's a few:
1. No standard way to import an external script file.
2. No multithreading.
3. Often hard to figure out what the keyword 'this' is referring to.
4. 'null' and 'undefined' are two different values (even though null == undefined evaluates to true!).
5. No namespaces.
How to solve those problems? Use one of the many existing OOP languages that don't suffer from any of them. You'd have to create an API for accessing the DOM from that language, and set up a sandbox within the browser, but at least you'd
Sick of "Google is Evil" claims (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is not evil points:
* Google massively supports open-source software
* Google pushes for open standards rather than lock-in
* Google has fought for the defense of fair use
* Google has fought for net-neutrality
* Google provides free services
* Google is wiling to take a loss on products to provide these free services
* Google allows you to easily export your data from their services, and even fully delete your online data/profiles
* Google is the cloud services provider that doesn't claim to own your data
* Google is running a test in Kansas of gigabit internet for the whole town and another test of free city-wide wifi.
* Google is the only search company to fight censorship in China
* Google is the only search company that refused to hand over user data to the Bush Administration
* Google fought Brazil as well to protect user data
* Google developed an open-source phone platform and has been encouraging handset manufacturers to open up and let consumers flash custom roms
Google is evil points:
* The Google Map street view team recorded data on open wifi networks. If people didn't want anyone to know you have a wireless network, you can turn off broadcasting the SSID.
* Google eventually caved/compromised on one portion of net-neutrality. They have a joint proposal with Verizon that would ensure the internet itself is protected by net neutrality, but wireless phone providers would be allowed to provide unique content and services. Is this really all that evil of a compromise?
* Google hasn't released the source code of Honeycomb because they don't want the market diluted with phones with a bad phone stack, but has promised to release the source code of Ice Cream Sandwich when it comes out in October/November. Man, that really is evil!
Seriously, the assumption that Google must be evil just because they are a big corporation is a flawed, simplistic view. I'd rather judge them on their actions. And according to their actions, they are the only major IT company out there I would trust given that my alternatives are Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, etc.
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That is all that needs to be said, even while there's a lot more.
And seriously, you can make that kind of list of any company, even Microsoft. MS does a lot of cool R&D in Microsoft Research, they give out software freely to students, they give out Visual Studio Express freely, they support charities, and they also massively support open source software outside of their core business.
G
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Microsoft has a patent specifically on how to best sell your private data to the highest bidder. I'm trying to find it at the moment, but searching for Microsoft and patents mainly returns results on Novell, Nortel, Android, etc. And why exactly did Microsoft file this patent in conjunction of their purchase of Skype:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/72771.html [technewsworld.com]
And you may want to read these:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-18/social-media/29443159_1_facebook-profiles-status-updates-adver [indiatimes.com]
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The whole China thing was a hot mess for Google. They caught a lot of heat because they actually complied with the censorship laws of China [wikipedia.org] when opening up shop over there. If I recall, they didn't start being vocal about the censorship until the whole "Chinese government hacked our e-mails" thing. They are still in China, just not their search.
Google didn't make
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They had no choice but to comply with laws, or they wouldn't be allowed to operate in China. But they did their best to circumvent the laws such as redirecting traffic to Hong Kong serves that didn't have to censor results. And any results that were censored flatly said on the page "These search results have been censored." China didn't like that, but it didn't violate the law.
If you're on the internet, people are collecting your data. One company is open about it, and goes to length to protect your private
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Option 1 - Don't have any in roads in China.
Option 2 - Establish in roads in China and try to actively circumvent censorship so that individuals can find information they wouldn't otherwise, and make it clear to them that they are being censored by they government.
It is said that you don't recognize what they were doing, that you call evil.
Re:Sick of "Google is Evil" claims (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention:
Microsoft censored everything and didn't try to work around it at all. They also agreed to let China have full access to Microsoft controlled email.
Yahoo handed over email as well, which led to a journalist going to jail.
RIM hands over messages and email to help put dissidents in jail.
Google doesn't. Which one do you hear getting called evil each day? Why are the others getting a free pass?
Stop letting astroturfers win.
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A lot of your "not evil" points can be offset by the "is evil" point: "Google only does things that are in their business' best interest."
So...you're saying capitalism within a competetive market is evil? I'd call it good business.
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Along with the excellent point about their entire business model being built around invading people's privacy, but here's another for the evil list:
* Funding WikiMapia to drive people to edit their closed maps and directly advertising against projects like OpenStreetMap.
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Invading privacy? That is a bit harsh, right?
Microsoft patents a technology to spy on VOIP calls without telling you while purchasing Skype. Google tells you that they're scraping your data to serve up ads. If you don't use Google services, they never see your private data.
If you can't understand the distinction, then I don't know what to tell you. People demand/expect free services, but don't think seeing ads is a fair trade-off. The markets that Google have entered have all greatly improved thanks to Goog