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A comment on Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers. Parent comment

Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by noir_lord on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:05PM (#13941676)
Same with me except I'm using bash and the CLI to all the modern tools.

In 6 months I'll still remember how bash works and I get super simple debugging since I can just echo out the command it was about to run and start poking.

I'm still not sure why the JS community seems determined to slowly bootstrap an OS in javascript.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by zaptheimpaler on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:49PM (#13942867)
>I'm still not sure why the JS community seems determined to slowly bootstrap an OS in javascript.

Oh if only this was a joke. No.. its happening.

https://www.os-js.org/

https://node-os.com/

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by nitemice on Thursday March 23, 2017 @09:14PM (#13945776)
The future is coming!

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by jryan49 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @07:19PM (#13945239)
We'll know os-js is finished when they finally put in a web browser. :)
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by Animats on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:24PM (#13944454)
Right on schedule. Mandatory XKCD: [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1508/

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by adamsea on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:22PM (#13941841)
For projects with not-overly-complicated builds, I have had success writing each desired script as a shell script, but then calling said shell script with an npm script.

The shell scripts are nice for longevity, self-documenting, and if you have to call them with non-javascripty things.

Calling them with npm scripts is nice for consistency, readability for many devs, and some of the path-setting/node.js process.env-var stuff that you are able to do in an npm script.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by clock_tower on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:37PM (#13942728)
I'm guessing it's the inner-platform effect in action, but I could have sworn that there's a more detailed name for it in reference to Javascript in particular -- something about systems always existing on the edge of acceptability or of legibility, or thereabouts. I think this was on Ward's Wiki, but I can't find it...
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by adrianratnapala on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:58PM (#13943648)
> I'm still not sure why the JS community seems determined to slowly bootstrap an OS in javascript.

Well it worked for Emacs didn't it?

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by marcosdumay on Thursday March 23, 2017 @04:28PM (#13943940)
You joke, but Emacs commands just interface the standard tools on your system, not replace them.

And yes, Emacs programs get deprecated fast (compared to UNIX programs, they are way, way slow compared to JS code), but somehow people don't suffer to update them (mostly because people developing for Emacs know about that "compatibility" word).

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by TeMPOraL on Thursday March 23, 2017 @04:24PM (#13943904)
It works for Emacs because it gives everything a consistent yet very powerful user interface, that facilitates heavy interoperability. In fact, that interface is more consistent and more powerful than most people have in their operating system.

Browsers, on the other hand, promote the exact opposite - inconsistent and weak interfaces, and no interop.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by dasil003 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:13PM (#13941748)
> I'm still not sure why the JS community seems determined to slowly bootstrap an OS in javascript.

Portability.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by Cacti on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:21PM (#13941838)
That's a load of crap, there's nothing portable about a JS environment that requires build xyz of browser pqr, plus the hardware requirements, bandwidth requirements, etc. Take any ONE of those away and you're hosed (e.g., try loading even a single web page from Amazon on 56k).

Every technology of the past 40 years has claimed "portability" as its mantra, and yet here we are still.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by dasil003 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:29PM (#13941926)
Sure, but the web is a unique portability story in the history of computing. Has any other platform been an open standard that ends up being table stakes for any new entrant? Think about it, if you try to make a computer without a web browser today, you'd be laughed out of the market.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by ktRolster on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:36PM (#13942722)
Has any other platform been an open standard that ends up being table stakes for any new entrant?

C, Java. Far more computers run C than run Javascript.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by esrauch on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:51PM (#13942893)
Number of machines that can run code written in the language isn't really the best metric for realistic portability. Sure, your toaster might run C and not JS, but it isn't going on run your C anyway.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by TeMPOraL on Thursday March 23, 2017 @04:29PM (#13943947)
My browser isn't running my JavaScript, it's running yours. In fact, the capability to run my own code in my own browser is being slowly but systematically removed from the browser.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by esrauch on Friday March 24, 2017 @08:15AM (#13948363)
When I said "you" I meant "the developer" not "the user": the class of devices that run C and not JS is also a class of devices that generally don't run third party code. If you aren't a hardware manufacturer (or trying to sell middleware to one) the fact the embedded systems run binaries that were programmed in C isn't in any way relevant.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by c22 on Friday March 24, 2017 @03:04PM (#13951359)
If only that toaster had a web browser.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by moron4hire on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:06PM (#13944287)
Yeah, good luck getting that Qt app running on an iPhone.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by tedunangst on Thursday March 23, 2017 @06:03PM (#13944763)
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/ios-support.html
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by divanvisagie on Friday March 24, 2017 @02:41AM (#13947133)
Wow , that was beautiful
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by ktRolster on Thursday March 23, 2017 @08:18PM (#13945552)
QT is not C
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by scintill76 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:36PM (#13942009)
bash, make, and a POSIX suite probably run on many more platforms than nodejs does.

There is the caveat that too many people think they're writing portable shell scripts etc., but really they only work with GNU tools on Linux or MacOS. Then again, the same probably applies to many JS build scripts that end up relying on OS-specific behavior somewhere...

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by stymaar on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:29PM (#13941918)
In my previous job, we had some bash scripts for a lot of things. It worked pretty well among Linux and Mac users in the team, but one day we had a new developer who was a windows user … We rewritten all those scripts in JavaScript using Grunt.

Maybe nowaday it's different thanks to Windows subsystem for Linux.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by bigato on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:19PM (#13943209)
Wouldn't it be better for one developer to learn and adapt to the rest of the team? I don't get why all the rest had to adapt to this single person who didn't know shell.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by Klathmon on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:49PM (#13943537)
There's a benefit to having multiple platforms on your development team if you are developing something for multiple platforms.

It's too often I see projects with "supports Linux, OSX, and Windows" only to find that none of the maintainers actually own a Mac and therefore it is filled with bugs and often requires the user to "find their own dependencies".

If we are talking days of time and not weeks, the benefits of making (and keeping) your whole system cross platform could pay off big time in the future when you or someone on your team wants to switch, or you just want to easily test on other platforms.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by stymaar on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:19PM (#13944402)
Exactly: Having a developer working on windows was a blessing since it allowed someone in the team to test on EI11 before we shipped to the product team, and it really improved our reactivity on this plateform. It wasn't our main target since our product was using webRtc(i.e. Firefox and Chrome), but it was supposed to fail gracefully on IE.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by nawitus on Thursday March 23, 2017 @06:39PM (#13944987)
At least these days you can download VirtualBox images for free to test on IE11. But yeah, it's a luxury if there's a Windows developer that you can have fixing all the IE11 bugs ;).
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by jimmaswell on Friday March 24, 2017 @02:23PM (#13951029)
I was under the impression that IE was standards compliant enough by version 11 that this shouldn't be necessary, but I guess not.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by path411 on Monday March 27, 2017 @05:00PM (#13971731)
Well, it's pretty complaint to standards now. The problem is that it's just 2-3 year old standards.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by laumars on Friday March 24, 2017 @02:50AM (#13947170)
There's plenty of other POSIX userlands for Windows before WSL (cygwin, Ming). There are also plenty of other cross platform programming environments before Grunt (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, numerous lisps, etc).

JavaScript isn't unique. It's not even the best at what it does. It just has a monopoly in the browser so people latched on to it.

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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by kbutler on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:47PM (#13943504)
Cygwin or msys2 would probably have let that dev run the build scripts.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by dorfsmay on Thursday March 23, 2017 @11:56PM (#13946468)
Asking that new dev to install cygwin might have been easier!
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by pjmlp on Friday March 24, 2017 @09:04AM (#13948613)
As if JavaScript would be the only option.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by gbuk2013 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:17PM (#13941789)
This is a valid concern, if it applies to your individual scenario. Nothing wrong with using the right tool for the job.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by afdsadf on Thursday March 23, 2017 @09:27PM (#13945827)
I don't care whether or not this is a joke, it's hilarious.
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by kbutler on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:35PM (#13943377)
bash -x script Echoes all the commands for you for easier tracing/debugging...
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Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers by noir_lord on Friday March 24, 2017 @11:57AM (#13949774)
Neat, always nice to learn new things :).
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