News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by wvenable on Monday September 12, 2016 @02:52AM (#12477707)
> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages

The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars.

> Pick a language, any language, and then restrict yourself to features only ten years old.

C# 2.0 in 2006 added:

    Generics
    Partial types
    Anonymous methods
    Iterators
    Nullable types
    Getter/setter separate accessibility
    Method group conversions (delegates)
    Co- and Contra-variance for delegates
    Static classes
    Delegate inference
Not to mention C# 1.0 already being statically and strongly typed, had properties and events, reference and value types, interfaces, namespaces, and a reasonably complete standard library. And that's just one language.

JavaScript is so far away from this it's not even funny. It doesn't even have proper numeric types. It's casting rules compare favorably with PHP!

So I don't buy the argument that JavaScript isn't suitable for large projects because browser makers aren't keeping up with the latest standards. JavaScript is a scripting language that's been pushed into tasks it's not suitable for because it is everywhere.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by TeMPOraL on Monday September 12, 2016 @06:06AM (#12478399)
> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars.

I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods.

The problem isn't with JavaScript, the problem is with the culture which glorifies mindlesss throwing of shit at a wall to see what sticks, instead of actually thinking of what one's doing and checking if a given topic wasn't already explored by smart people a few decades ago.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by porker on Monday September 12, 2016 @06:31AM (#12478507)
> I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods.

More info please?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by TeMPOraL on Monday September 12, 2016 @06:57AM (#12478637)
Consider this - the 50-80s era was known not only for putting men on the Moon, military and space agencies were doing a lot of crazy shit like space shuttle that could start and land autonomously (Buran), or capturing small items dropped from orbit mid-flight over the ocean (Corona program, see [0]), precisely targeting cruise missiles [1], etc. - all without the benefits of microcomputers we know today, without high-level languages, cheap computing devices, etc.

It seems that back then people were more focused on making things actually work instead of making them look sexy and easy to sell.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)#Recovery

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#His...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by wvenable on Monday September 12, 2016 @01:10PM (#12481521)
It required unbelievable amount of man power and money to do those things. The real benefit to all our modern technology is to do more with less. It's not that people were more focused; it's just that there were many more of them and there was way more money involved.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by circlefavshape on Monday September 12, 2016 @05:42AM (#12478319)
> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars

Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by astrodust on Monday September 12, 2016 @10:43AM (#12480062)
Google and Tesla beg to differ.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by circlefavshape on Monday September 12, 2016 @12:41PM (#12481219)
For a very restricted definition of "self-driving" ... but fair enough, in the context of the parent post, the self-driving cars we do have are impressive pieces of software
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by astrodust on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @12:38PM (#12489912)
Google's cars are operating on city streets you know. They're up to over 1.5 million miles.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? by astrodust on Monday September 12, 2016 @10:42AM (#12480051)
JavaScript, unlike C#, is intended to be easily implementable. The team that built Mono had a mountain of work to do before that was a useful product.

Meanwhile a college-level student can probably write a JavaScript interpreter that passes all the specification tests in six months. It won't be fast, but it will work.

Yes, there are better languages, but stop freaking out. If you're such a fan of C# then work on getting C# to transpile down to JavaScript, asm.js, or WebAssembly and ignore the ugly parts of the JavaScript language entirely.

JavaScript is both amazing and ridiculous all at once. Deal with it.

[ Parent | on HN ]