News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language Has Become Most Popular. Parent comment

Re:JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming La... by DLWormwood on Friday January 02, 2009 @12:08PM (#417440)
> I want to say something about leaky abstractions and caution the reader that writing code that you then pass to something that generates some other code is a very very scary thing by and large.

You are aware that programmers have been doing this in essence since Assembly Language was invented right? Programming directly in binary is just too much for our human minds to take.

That said, you are much more correct than you realize. Even programming a "simple" or "direct" translation, like compiling from C to object code is rife with pitfalls...

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming La... by litewulf on Friday January 02, 2009 @05:31PM (#417826)
Well, yes, hence my explicit mention of GCC and the java compiler. :)

In general, as long as the compiler is bug free, you should be fine. Its just that never running into a compiler bug is much less likely when you're using very new code. Code is often buggy after all ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]