+1

The web and mobile world is plagued with prompts stating that "X needs to access your data Y" or "X needs permission Z" to "do the job".

Worst part of it? Developers and architects are often the first ones to believe this nonsense.

When you're surrounded by developers, users and managers who believe in werewolves, best thing to do is just to nod :)

> > The internet needs Javascript

> No it doesn't.

Do you prefer the web from 1995? No youtube, no github, no google docs, no google maps, no real-time in-browser messengers/chats, no hangouts/google_meet/jitsi, etc. etc.?

Half of those aren't really needed and are better server by native apps anyway.

However the Internet isn't the Web, so certainly the Internet doesn't need Javascript.

Also neither does the web, but for sites that can provide functionality which wouldn't be possible without javascript it can be a nice optional feature. Though all of the examples you gave either do not need javascript (youtube, github) or are better as native apps (google docs, google maps, IMs).

Native apps meant "for Windows and Mac only". While JavaScript has its problems, nontechnical members of my family are happy to run Ubuntu and get done everything they need to get done, because the browser can do it, because of JavaScript.

And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden, the industry decided to reinvent the entire von Neumann architecture in interpreted JavaScript and dub it “assembly,” whatever that means. Then since you’re already in a browser at that point, why not phone home and say hi, and anyone who dares to instead suggest that software operate without an Internet connection is told “just stop” because the “market has spoken” and absolutely no progress was made in software engineering until the pointless backlog that nobody looks at was pointlessly filled by pointless, automated telemetry.

Industry practices collapse under the weight of their own complexity and people argue on HN about it with absolutely no context on the real issue, just presupposed bugbears like “privacy”. Video at 11.

JavaScript is the single worst thing to happen to computing in its history. Maybe not the language itself - it’s fine enough for its purposes - but the industry deciding that its purposes overlap with a wildcard glob is a huge mistake that we will be paying for long after everyone in this conversation is deceased. It’s annoying that you credit that situation to JavaScript and laud it given what else comes with doing everything in a browser (enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc)

> enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc

I can give you computers running slower. As for the surveillance economy, I am not sure why you think that installing someone else's crap on your computer is preferable compared to running that crap in your browser and blowing most of it away every time you leave the site (or blowing it away completely by clearing your browser's storage). As for network dependencies, websites are now perfectly capable of running offline, while native apps may need network access for doing anything useful as much as a browser app does.

As a developer, I would rather write once and run everywhere. As a user, I would rather not install hundreds of megabytes of someone else's "apps" that could have been a web page on my computer, other than the bare necessities that I am comfortable with. Nor do I particularly care to update those installed apps locally, downloading hundreds of megabytes more or having the risk to run into software version issues. Having vim on my machine is fine. Having Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit is not.

> And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden

They exist since decades, but apparently C and C++ are even more hated than JavaScript.

No, they don’t. If they did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Since you’ll probably pedant me with several names I can already think of, it’s worth remembering that existing does not imply easing burden nor being useful beyond a README and a weekend jog.

I could teach you with 30 year experience writing GUIs, but most likely that would require listing several names that you already know.

So lets spend ourselves some time that you can get yourself improving your Electron skills instead.

Linux community can only blame themselves, it is the only platform without a full stack for native development, unless we are speaking about X Athena Widgets, left behind UNIX several decades ago.

Each distribution is a snowflake, and now GNOME even considers UI design tooling something worthwhile killing in name of GtkBuilder with raw XML, exactly what UI/UX designers have asked for.

So everyone pays the cost for a handful of Linux users?

I mean, even if you were fine with that, nowadays pretty much everything is available on Linux too and crossplatform development tools for native applications existed for decades already.

TBH you could actually do youtube and github just fine with no javascript. Browsers have native video player support for a while and do not require javascript to function. You could even embed ads into a video stream and make it indistinguishable from a normal video file.

GitHub almost works as-is without javascript. Pretty much the only stuff that doesn't work is stuff that gets loaded after the initial page load, and that could be changed to load with the page.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

You mistake everyone using javascript to do those things as the only way it's possible to do those things. That's certainly not true.

You can use HTML, Canvas, and CSS to do just about everything you mentioned.

Video is easy. In pure HTML: <video autoplay loop muted playsinline src="..."></video>. No Javascript (or even CSS) required. You can certainly expand on that as well.

Google Maps does not require Javascript to provide it's core and common functionality either: https://appelsiini.net/2008/google-maps-without-javascript/ You would have to make some changes, but core functionality still exists.

Github does not require Javascript to function. You can toggle JS off and still use it pretty much as is, and the features that do break are trivial to implement without it.

Interactive realtime chat does not require javascript. https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat , and the same principals can be applied to online docs and editors as well.

Javascript is the norm because it has inertia behind it - largely due to circumstance more than any inherent natural benefit, not because it has some secret sauce that the internet needs that couldn't be easily replaced should it be Thanos-meets-Tron-Crossover Snapped out of existence.

A much stronger argument in favor of Javascript would not be pointing to all the good things you can do with it, but rather, with how well and optimized and streamlined doing those things with Javascript is these days. Just to clarify, I'm not saying Javascript is the problem, but rather, the abuse of it, and that abuse would still be an issue if other technologies replaced it one day.

I use the internet with JS toggled off by default as a result of the rampant abuse of dark patterns (for example, the Google Search Suggested Alternatives box that is served below the sponsored result(s) that always "conveniently" expands after a short delay to push the first actual result down the page and replaces it with yet more sponsored content), 3rd party/cross site abuses (Malware), as well as the overabundance and omnipresent ad-spam. Sites that break as a result of my opt-in JS browsing is usually a sign it's not worth my time. Sometimes I'm proven wrong, but sites that can fallback gracefully and display some basic info without JS are usually the worst offenders..

TL;DR: Yes, in a way, I do prefer "the web from 1995", where Javascript isn't everywhere, and only present in places that I specifically whitelist, because it's all too often abused to negatively impact my experience instead of enriching it.