<story><title>JavaScript at 20</title><url>http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattmanser</author><text>Works on OSes. We have a choice.&lt;p&gt;In browsers, the OSes of the web, nope, just a bad language designed in 10 days that resists all attempts to make it not bad.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter if you like javascript, there&amp;#x27;s so many people who don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Why do you get to dictate whether we can or can&amp;#x27;t develop on the web? You leave us with a horrible choice, use what we consider to be one of the worst modern languages, or not develop. Why do you get to make our professional lives miserable?</text></item><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>&amp;gt; Just let me know when browser vendors are going to break down the two-tiered system, and let us run those myriad of alternatives alongside -- instead of under -- JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;The complexity of doing that would be needlessly high compared to just improving JavaScript. Having to integrate a C++ DOM with a JS DOM is hard enough. Think about how you handle cross-language cycles…&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.&lt;p&gt;You mean like Firefox?</text></item><item><author>teacup50</author><text>There are no end of alternatives out there today, from mobile platforms to research languages exploring a myriad of aspects of computer science.&lt;p&gt;Just let me know when browser vendors are going to break down the two-tiered system, and let us run the legion of alternatives alongside -- instead of under -- JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.</text></item><item><author>knightofmars</author><text>&amp;quot;Haters gonna hate.&amp;quot;  Anyone claiming that JS is the &amp;quot;worst thing to happen to the web&amp;quot; and&amp;#x2F;or that some other language would miraculously solve all of the problems present in JS should do the following, &amp;quot;Go create it.&amp;quot;  Don&amp;#x27;t whine about the barriers and how a new language would never be adopted because &amp;quot;JS is already everywhere.&amp;quot;  There are plenty of people already trying to solve this problem by actively doing something.  I&amp;#x27;ve worked with enough engineers that love to criticize every design choice made but when it comes to asking them what the better alternative is they have nothing to say.  They just &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s a better way.  Well, stop using your intuition based rationalizing that there&amp;#x27;s a problem and start using your creative and logical faculties to actually solve the &amp;quot;perceived&amp;quot; problem before presenting a criticism.  Or at a minimum present a well thought out and actionable direction towards the solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcwalton</author><text>&amp;gt;  Works on OSes. We have a choice.&lt;p&gt;The kernel doesn&amp;#x27;t have a DOM. On the Web, the number of GC&amp;#x27;d objects that every &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; has to deal with exceeds the number of file descriptors by an order of magnitude.&lt;p&gt;Also, you do have a choice: you can compile your favorite language to JS, even low-level ones via asm.js.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Why do you get to dictate whether we can or can&amp;#x27;t develop on the web? You leave us with a horrible choice, use what we consider to be one of the worst modern languages, or not develop. Why do you get to make our professional lives miserable?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not the choice: you can compile your favorite language to JavaScript. That&amp;#x27;s what source maps, asm.js, and the like are for. And JS is being improved all the time; it&amp;#x27;s not static.&lt;p&gt;Trying to add another language has been tried multiple times and has always failed, because having two languages that both interact with the DOM is much more difficult than just improving JS.</text></comment>
<story><title>JavaScript at 20</title><url>http://brendaneich.github.io/ModernWeb.tw-2015/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattmanser</author><text>Works on OSes. We have a choice.&lt;p&gt;In browsers, the OSes of the web, nope, just a bad language designed in 10 days that resists all attempts to make it not bad.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter if you like javascript, there&amp;#x27;s so many people who don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Why do you get to dictate whether we can or can&amp;#x27;t develop on the web? You leave us with a horrible choice, use what we consider to be one of the worst modern languages, or not develop. Why do you get to make our professional lives miserable?</text></item><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>&amp;gt; Just let me know when browser vendors are going to break down the two-tiered system, and let us run those myriad of alternatives alongside -- instead of under -- JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;The complexity of doing that would be needlessly high compared to just improving JavaScript. Having to integrate a C++ DOM with a JS DOM is hard enough. Think about how you handle cross-language cycles…&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.&lt;p&gt;You mean like Firefox?</text></item><item><author>teacup50</author><text>There are no end of alternatives out there today, from mobile platforms to research languages exploring a myriad of aspects of computer science.&lt;p&gt;Just let me know when browser vendors are going to break down the two-tiered system, and let us run the legion of alternatives alongside -- instead of under -- JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;Or, they could take their own medicine, and try and write the browser in JS.</text></item><item><author>knightofmars</author><text>&amp;quot;Haters gonna hate.&amp;quot;  Anyone claiming that JS is the &amp;quot;worst thing to happen to the web&amp;quot; and&amp;#x2F;or that some other language would miraculously solve all of the problems present in JS should do the following, &amp;quot;Go create it.&amp;quot;  Don&amp;#x27;t whine about the barriers and how a new language would never be adopted because &amp;quot;JS is already everywhere.&amp;quot;  There are plenty of people already trying to solve this problem by actively doing something.  I&amp;#x27;ve worked with enough engineers that love to criticize every design choice made but when it comes to asking them what the better alternative is they have nothing to say.  They just &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s a better way.  Well, stop using your intuition based rationalizing that there&amp;#x27;s a problem and start using your creative and logical faculties to actually solve the &amp;quot;perceived&amp;quot; problem before presenting a criticism.  Or at a minimum present a well thought out and actionable direction towards the solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t actually work on (GUI) OSes - there is a strong incentive to write your app in the language and framework that is native to the platform, because you&amp;#x27;re asking for a lot of pain and a substandard customer experience otherwise.  You write your Windows apps in C# and .NET.  You write your Android apps in Java.  You write your iOS apps in Objective-C, and now Swift.  You write your Gnome apps in C with Gtk+, and your KDE apps in C++ with Qt, and your Eclipse plugins in Java with SWT, and your Emacs extensions in Emacs Lisp.  In all these cases (except Apple), you &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; write your apps in a different language, but virtually nobody does, because you end up fighting the platform.&lt;p&gt;Servers and command-line tools are an exception because your interaction with the host platform is limited to a few dozen syscalls that can be easily bound to a number of different languages.  Not so with most GUI software.</text></comment>