I feel slightly overwhelmed

[andrewducker]

So, about three weeks ago I posted about Javascript, different languages in the browser, bytecode, etc..

I then crossposted to Hacker News, where it generated a fair chunk of conversation, including comments from some people who worked at Netscape.

And then today I discovered that Brendan Eich, who _created_ Javascript had picked up on it, and had done a ten minute talk triggered by it! (It's well worth listening to if you're at all interested in this kind of thing.)

It really does feel funny when a 30 second whine on my journal can end up with one of the prime movers of the modern internet giving his opinion on it.

Personally, I hold robhu responsible for suggesting the idea to me in the first place.

Comments

[diotina.livejournal.com]

awesome!

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I deny everything.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I listened to the 10 minute talk, and I was really disappointed.

He spends the first bit of the talk saying that a byte code format is not helpful to Javascript, but then no one ever said it was. He then talks about how fantastic JS is, but this evangelism I don't think persuades any of the other people out there who prefer other languages.

After that he argues that JS performs well and that a byte code format would be no good because different people would want to implement the byte code differently etc. This is misleading - the Java VMs (not just the Sun one) have excellent performance, and there is a lot of optimisation you can do between having some bytecode format and actually running something.

Then he says that, well, it'd just be really hard to persuade people to do it - but this is really just a variation of the 'Javascript is great and it's already there' argument that isn't very convincing. Finally he suggests that people just target their compilers to output javascript, but the reality is (and I've seen compilers that do target JS) the performance of things compiled to Javascript is often very poor (which ... you'd expect).

Other than saying that it'd be technically a bit tricky and you'd need to persuade people it was a good idea (so they implemented it in their browser) I got the impression he thought it was a bad idea not because it really was a bad idea, but because he's the creator of Javascript and so he thinks JS is good enough for everyone.

I however I don't think that - and ISTM that the reason that Javascript is almost exclusively used in the browser but almost never anywhere else is because there's not really any other choice in the browser, not because it is actually superior.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah - and he talked about putting lots of different runtimes in the browser - which is a red herring as it isn't what the discussion was about.

[simont]

Thanks. I was just thinking it would be helpful if someone had posted a transcript or summary so I didn't have to sit through a ten-minute video :-) (The 'crowdsourced full transcript' on the page looks somewhat less than full...)

a byte code format is not helpful to Javascript, but then no one ever said it was

Doesn't Flash standardise a byte code format to which you compile what's basically Javascript? So somebody did say it was :-)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure my summary is an entirely fair one! I was a bit annoyed with the way I felt he ignored what the question was actually about.

Doesn't Flash standardise a byte code format to which you compile what's basically Javascript? So somebody did say it was :-)
In fairness to him he was responding to the discussion on HN at that point (he doesn't refer to [Bad username or site: andrewducker' / @ livejournal.com]'s blog at all, so maybe someone said that there.

Is Flash a 'standard' in any sense? I thought people had to reverse engineer the bytecode? There was a language other than Actionscript/Javascript that compiled to the Flash bytecode, but it was never very widely adopted.

[simont]

All right, maybe 'standard' is questionable, but they did at least start with Javascript and then decide it made more sense to ship a compiled bytecode format than the JS source.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure ActionScript is identical to Javascript. When I used it it felt like it was, but given that it has a different name it's possible it's different in some more advanced way that I never used.

I've found that language now btw, it's called HaXe. It now compiles to AS byte code as well as a whole bunch of other things.