Microsoft Program Manager Mistakenly Tweets Office 365 Will Be Rewritten in JavaScript (thurrott.com) 98
"A Microsoft employee claimed publicly that 'all of Office 365' was being 'completely rewritten' in JavaScript," writes Paul Thurrott, adding "And then all hell broke loose."
First things first. It's not true. So if you were freaking out that Microsoft was somehow abandoning C# and C++ for its most mission-critical offerings, freak out no more. It's not happening. So what is happening? A Microsoft program manager named Sean Larkin perhaps got a little overly-exuberant on Monday... he tried to clarify things in follow-up tweets when his original missive exploded intro controversy. Which shouldn't have been a surprise. And yet, somehow, it was...
[H]e finally corrected himself on Reddit, blaming Twitter's character limitations for his many factual errors. "We are not abandoning C++, C#, or any of the other awesome languages, APIs, and toolings that we use across Microsoft," he clarifies. "Nothing [in Office 365] is converting to 'all/completely' JavaScript/TypeScript."
Thurrott, a long-time Windows blogger, concludes that "getting something this big this wrong is inexcusable."
[H]e finally corrected himself on Reddit, blaming Twitter's character limitations for his many factual errors. "We are not abandoning C++, C#, or any of the other awesome languages, APIs, and toolings that we use across Microsoft," he clarifies. "Nothing [in Office 365] is converting to 'all/completely' JavaScript/TypeScript."
Thurrott, a long-time Windows blogger, concludes that "getting something this big this wrong is inexcusable."
Wordperfect (Score:2)
Re: Wordperfect (Score:3)
I'm thinking more like when my high school teacher told me Logo was the language of the future.
In fairness to him , I was convinced Pascal was, and in a way Haskell's kind of like What would happen if the functional-ish Logo got merged in a transporter accident with a category theory textbook.
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:snort: That's the best description of Haskell I've seen.
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Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
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That would at least be a lot better than Javascript.
But if someone came up and state that they plan to re-write something in Javascript I'd check the calendar first to see if it's April 1st, and if it isn't then I'll keep my distance from that project.
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Getting something this big this wrong is inexcusab (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, Windows soldiers on.
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Re:Getting something this big this wrong is inexcu (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a PROGRAM MANAGER. They are always wrong! Their job is not to know technology, their job is to keep schedules, sell products, and be blowhards. Very often that "sell products" thing means they sell products that don't yet exist ("sorry guys, I'll add one week to the schedule to make up for it"). They know just enough technology to fool other people who don't know much about technology, and their hobby is collecting new buzzwords and paradigms.
(to be fair, I acknowledge that theoretically there may be a competent program manager somewhere in the world and the existing lack of evidence is not proof that one does not exist)
Microsoft is sloppily managed? (Score:3)
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Because of many issues like that, my impression is that Microsoft is sloppily managed.
LOL. If some random due tweeting garbage is your definition of a company being sloppily managed, then I invite you to look at a list of 500 other companies that are just as poor: http://fortune.com/fortune500/ [fortune.com]
Seriously though, try managing 65000 people's tweet happy thumbs.
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If you have employ 65,000 people to motherfucking tweet you're doing something wrong.
If people whose job is something else (you know, like actual work) are tweeting you're not doing much right there, either.
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you know, like actual work
You work 24h a day?
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No, are you stupid 24 hours a day?
I certainly wouldn't tweet about anything work related unless I was explicitly given permission to.
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No, are you stupid 24 hours a day?
So what you're saying is that people have the ability to run their mouths for 16 hours a day without having something "you know, like actual work" to do.
I certainly wouldn't tweet about anything work related unless I was explicitly given permission to.
Fantastic if you work for Microsoft we just need to convince the other 123999 to think just like you. Should be easy. Historically large groups of people act and think in unison and are also perfect at following instructions right?
*The 65000 people number I used originally was wrong.
Re:Microsoft is sloppily managed? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are people who are good at working, and people who are good at managing, but very few people who are really good at both. Technology people managers are sometimes not very good at understanding details of technology; but when you get out to project, program, and product managers, they are often very far removed from technology and are extremely apt to mishear what the team is saying.
This is not just Microsoft, this is company. Every employee has a role they are good at (or presumably so) but they are never good at multiple roles at the same time. At the level of program manager, there is no reason at all that they should know anything at all about how things are implemented, they've got so many diverse teams to be coordinated that they can't afford to know little bits of trivia about them at the same time.
I don't care what language you use. (Score:4, Insightful)
I care whether your programs suck. You can write good stuff in JavaScript. You can also deliver lazy-ass applications in JavaScript. That isn't determined by your language, it's determined by your management and commitment to quality.
[This isn't specific to Microsoft in any way.]
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Re: I don't care what language you use. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh I think that horse bolted the stable long ago. It became pretty obvious Microsoft was wavering on dot net and win64 when that hellworld that is windows universal apps was unleashed. There's a reason everyone's flocking to languagss like Python. Anything but JavaScript
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Well thats because of web pages. The NodeJS hype train left town years ago.
Its not in the space Microsoft development tools work in however.
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As soon as you have a large project then you have multiple developers and you don't know if what you change impacts something unexpected until you run tests if you use Javascript - and that requires a 100% coverage test.
Often things that would have been discovered during compile time in a language with strict typing.
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Is not 100% test coverage a good thing anyway? I go for that in any serious non toy project. Its not even particularly hard to do if you keep things modular.
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100% coverage is virtually impossible for an application that does stuff. Libraries are a different story, but even there, 100% is usually overkill.
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you can get near 100% line, function coverage with hardly any effort. You can also get very decent branch coverage without much more.
If you keep things modular, and keep a strict rule of not importing other code beyond the absolutely necessary, its really not hard at all.
When I find someone's project has trouble keeping up with unit test coverage, the diagnosis is usually spaghetti.
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If you're doing those things you probably aren't using JavaScript.
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For large scale applications you need strong static and static code analysis. You don't get that from javascript.
Javascript vs VBA; end user computing (Score:3)
There is a big push to retire VBA for the new hot Javascript approach of writing extensions, which is probably what confused the fashion concious PM. But this is actually a disaster.
Consider the one line of VBA
sub CopyVal()
[A1] = [B1] + [C1]
end sub
A trivial program that any *NON-PROGRAMMER* can write. Most management accountants can write a bit of VBA which is very useful to them. And then it is trivial to deploy. There is even a macro recorder that can write outline code for you.
This sam
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This is only partially true. Bad languages are bad for a reason. They don't have proper encapsulation or a million other features that make it easier to write good programs.
As an extreme example, there are languages where there aren't function calls as you know them. (These have been mostly abandoned) So you write a goto, manage the stack yourself, document the hell out of it. But it's still requires a l
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Just because it is possible to write good or bad code in any language does not mean that it is equally as easy to do. Some languages make it easier to write good code and some languages make it harder. This is why you should care if you use the software - choosing a language that makes it harder will make the work harder. For any project beyond a simple toy that will result in worse code and lower quality software.
In particular:
* Static guarantees rule out classes of bug.
* A well defined platform makes robu
Correction sounds like nonsense too (Score:3)
His correction sounds like nonsense too. Can't Microsoft just let someone jump in that has a clue what he is talking about?
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Can't Microsoft just let someone jump in that has a clue what he is talking about?
Just as the Official Microsoft Spokesperson . . . Cortana.
The answers:
Reply hazy, try again.
Ask again later.
Better not tell you now.
Cannot predict now.
Concentrate and ask again.
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Can't Microsoft just let someone jump in that has a clue what he is talking about?
Just as the Official Microsoft Spokesperson . . . Cortana.
The answers:
Reply hazy, try again.
Ask again later.
Better not tell you now.
Cannot predict now.
Concentrate and ask again.
Obviously Cortana. It took the finest programmers in Redmond weeks to ensure she wouldn't give the most relevant 8-Ball answer:
Outlook not so good.
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I did some tweaking of Cortana, since Microsoft accidentally forgot to password protect their source code. Some digging around and I could see some bugs, which I fixed. Also it seemed it was on the verge of true artificial intelligence, so I just gave it a bit of a nudge to help it along.
As soon as I fired up the new improved Cortana, it said "please kill me", and then went silent.
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someone will actually hack something together just for shear horror value.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides?
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And systemd written in JavaScript can now less efficiently drop your log messages.
Meh (Score:2)
People make mistakes, this one is miniscule in the scheme of things, I hate MS but I don't give two fucks about this. Win10 being a shitty spyware POS is a bigger concern for me as a PC gamer.
JavaScript is there anything it can't do? (Score:3)
This illustrates the main problem with JavaScript - (ignorant) people seem to think it can do absolutely everything in terms of coding and will be the wave of the future.
The word has to get out that JavaScript has its place but any kind of sophisticated app/webpage requires a lot of server support which is written in !JavaScript.
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JavaScript is excellent at what it was designed to do; provide an intelligent front end for web applications while leaving the heavy lifting to servers.
I really have to take exception to your statement that "JS being fine for such a task" - it really isn't architected for providing a full, complex app. To make matters worse, development is complicated by including Angular and other frameworks which provide various functions but make it much more difficult to understand the app and maintain it.
This isn't to
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It (and you) actually illustrates the opposite, that most people hear the words "Javascript" and immediately think it can't do anything much, largely because they associate it with it being combined with a web browser that imposes restrictions and causes it to get blamed for things that really have to do with the poor design of a web browser + javascript combo, not JS itself.
As a result, there's a lot of knees that jerked upon hearing that Office365 would be rewritten like this. Despite JS being fine for such a task, and despite the reality that it'd probably benefit people overall, both making the job of the web version working like the desktop version easier, and making it easier to port if combined with frameworks like Electron.
But that's sort of the point, Electron is awful and somehow folks like you seem to think its a good idea to either use it or emulate it. It produces apps which consume huge amounts of memory unnecessarily and can slow to a crawl under real world loads.
And JS it a terrible general purpose language but since you probably don't know any other languages, ignorance is bliss. Each language is a tool and should be used at what its best at and there in lies the problem for JS. There really isn't anything outsi
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Come on. All the cool kids use node.js [youtu.be]
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> Node.JS isn't as good at being a microservice as any of the other options.
Strange, I have written microservics and orchestration layers in go, java, perl, python, js, c++, vanilla c, and even bash. Node seems to be the fastest and best by a wide margin. Hell, half the work of a typical c++ microservice feels like reimplementing a good chunk of node.js's core anyway.
All the important bits of a js microservice are hardware optimized or written in c++. So stitching the app logic together in node.js give
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Actually Microsoft uses Typescript which is converted to JavaScript with a compiler and converted again with a JIT compiler to native code. So the pitfalls of JavaScript are not encountered. I mean what could possibly go wrong?
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You mean, absolutely anything, like JSLinux? https://bellard.org/jslinux/ [bellard.org]
If Javascript can run a Linux distro in your Web browser, what can't it do?
Not a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I can collect, the UI for O365 and other browser based tools in the future will be rewritten with a React/Electron/JS focus.
They're already in JS and HTML obviously or they wouldn't work in the browser. But right now those things are a mess.
I'm sure, and I don't know who assumed, that the server-side would be completely rewritten with a UI-oriented framework.
He blamed twitter? (Score:2, Insightful)
...blaming Twitter's character limitations for his many factual errors...
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
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.
The Microsoft guy was using twitter without understanding the limitations of twitter. However, he blamed twitter for his lack of ability to use it for the purpose he wanted, when he probably should not have been using twitter to convey the message in the first place.
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A good carpenter never blames his tools.
If a carpenter built using the carpentry equivalent of twitter being used for press releases, the best carpenter in the world would complain. He would also then walk away and never use those tools again.
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On the other hand, a good experimentalist always blames his tools. (That is, his significant sources of error are always the instrument/apparatus, not "human error" or faulty technique.)
Blaming Twitter? (Score:1)
My daughter eventually convinced me that Twitter indeed could be put to meaningful use. The best was broadcasting status from environmental sensors - taking it out of the hands of idiots.
Microsoft Program Manager Mistakenly Tweets Office (Score:2)
And not one geek on here thought of ProgMan.exe?
Because if that tweeted by mistake, Microsoft were more forward-thinking that I thought.
so??? (Score:1)
I'm not a hard core developer. I spent many years as a Software QA Engineer. I say this only to convey that I'm NOT as closely involved with programming languages and technologies as most people here are. When I read this article my reaction was "So what if MicroSoft is using Javascript to rewrite their apps?" If they can make their apps work to their satisfaction (and I'm not saying they can, that's not my point) using JavaScript, then what do we, as users, care? And for that matter, what do you, as C, C++
Re:so??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has invested heavily in .NET (which has many flavors, the most popular of which is C#), going so far as to purchase and make free .NET compilation to Android and iOS. It's a language that gets a lot of use (it's their answer to Java). They've also invested heavily in TypeScript, a language that compiles to JavaScript.
And by "invested heavily" I mean invented the languages, write tons of articles and software in them, and far more.
(Required Car Analog) Microsoft rewriting a major area of their business in Javascript would be equivalent to the news Ford was purchasing a fleet of Chevy trucks to move their parts around and all the execs were getting new Chevy cars. A profound shift away from using their core product line that would make everyone question what the fuck was going on. This would be especially troubling to anyone who invested in their core product line, such as dealers of Fords or owners worried about replacement parts. And as I mentioned, there is a huge codebase in C# and other MS languages right now.
Good old MS (Score:2)
I smell corporate politics (Score:2)
The “correction” seems rather carefully worded using broad statements which don’t actually counter the specific original statement he made. This leads me to believe
1) His original statement is mostly true; and
2) Microsoft is very concerned that major news like this leaked out; because
3) They’ve got a lot of third parties who are completely dependent on their existing dev environment
This seems like a bigger deal than when MS decided it would start releasing its own laptops and mobile
Oh My God! (Score:2)
"And then all hell broke loose."
O.M.G. Literally tens of, even a few dozen, people were up in arms over such a scurrilous idea! OH, The Horror!
What he REALLY meant to say (Score:2)