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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm really running dry on respect for Brendan Eich. None of the moves he's making are for the benefit of user privacy - look at Brave, his new browser project. It replaces ads on the web with his own ads, tracks you, and puts money in his pocket instead of the publisher's pockets. I'm struggling to remember why he was respectable in the first place - for making JavaScript, an awful programming language we've spent 20 years trying to fix? I don't think that his word on these issues is worth anything any longer.

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Brave does not track anyone remotely, all data in the clear (which browsers all keep in various caches and history lists) stays on device. We will pay publishers 55% directly, and users 15%.

I think you didn't read our FAQ or other site docs, and just assumed the worst. Why is that?

Ignoring the negativity and taking it as an opportunity to improve your product and / or understanding of a segment of your audience.. I'll remember that!

I did read the FAQ. It's awful. I didn't realize just how awful it was until I read the FAQ.

How do you pay publishers on sites that aren't partnered with you?

From the FAQ:

8. How do you use Bitcoin (BTC)?

We’re still developing the system, now entirely in the open source on github.com, but at this point we know we will use BTC only for permissionless payment delivery to user and publisher wallets that we will create using BitGo’s APIs. We hope to keep funds in BTC only in monthly payment buffers, to reduce effects of volatility. We intend to let expert users “bring their own BTC” to self-fund their wallets and auto-micropay for as much of their browsing as they like.

See also https://www.brave.com/blogpost_2.html which discusses user and publisher wallets. We'll have more in a week or two on the Brave Ledger payment system.

> ... for making JavaScript, an awful programming language we've spent 20 years trying to fix?

First-class function is not bad for 1995.

Yeah, I have to say that there are many things I love about Javascript. Even the quirky this pointer is at least interesting (though not particularly useful). Internally JS is very elegant IMHO and it is easy to write beautiful code in many different paradigms.

On the downside: Type coercion is always a bad idea. There is an inconsistency between built in types and user constructed types. It has terrible standard class libraries. It is verbose.

But I can name half a dozen other languages that suffer from these problems and more. Judicious use of a transpiler (like coffeescript) and choice of third party libraries will go a long way. Personally, I enjoy working in coffeescript more than Ruby specifically because of the first class functions.

Not the best programming language in the world, but not the worst either, IMHO. It's just unfortunate that some of the more obvious shortcomings weren't fixed early on.

It's also quite average for languages of that time to have first-class functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...

He created JavaScript in 10 days. It's still in use 20 years later. That's very respectable.

Because it had (and still has) a monopoly on code that runs inside the browser. And it's a pig that's had quite a bit of lipstick put on it. It wouldn't be in widespread use if people had the choice.

That all said, WebAssembly is potentially an avenue to break that monopoly, and I do give him credit for seeking to address the issue.

People did have a choice: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, VBScript. Those all lost.

Three of those were plugins and the last was proprietary to Internet Explorer only, although I'll admit it was also worse than Javascript. "Javascript: It's better than VBScript!"

And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.

> Three of those were plugins and the last was proprietary to Internet Explorer only

They all started from a similar position, JS wasn't a standard from day one, there's a reason why it's emcascript today.

> And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.

That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?

>They all started from a similar position, JS wasn't a standard from day one, there's a reason why it's emcascript today.

No, Javascript had the huge advantage of being first; it's the only one on your list that both wasn't a plugin and was supported by IE and Netscape. And yes, modern Javascript is a better technology than any of those, although that's really damning with faint praise.

If Netscape Navigator 2 had shipped with, say, a Perl VM in addition to the Javascript VM, then I can guarantee you that everybody would've written their scripts in Perl instead of Javascript.

>That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?

Back in the day, the only ways you could write a web app of any complexity/performance were to either use Flash or do it serverside (remember – not long ago! – when the new hot web technology was Ruby on Rails? Remember when it was PHP?). Flash was the only option if you wanted video (well, it or something truly evil like RealPlayer) or if you wanted a consistent and appealing look for your site.

Flash was on 56% of all websites as of 2010: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/04/05/http-archive-url...

Google trends for Flash vs. Javascript in the SF Bay Area: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02p97%2C%20%2...

Flash has long been used to support features not-yet available in the DOM APIs such as copy/paste and video, and of course in ads. There's a huge difference between that and building Flash apps; apps where a flash-displayed interface is the primary way of using the app. Outside of games those were never very popular, JS had overcome it with Google Maps.

>He created JavaScript in 10 days.

It shows. JavaScript is fucking horrible, to put it mildly.

Haha, God made the world in 7 days, it's even worse.

Its got bad parts and its got good parts. Once you learn how to ignore the bad parts (and the bad examples) the language really shines. Especially with the newer versions.

Stockholm Syndrome.

I've written DSLs in a day that have seen usage beyond its original intent. Javascript's a dirty hack that's only had dirtier hacks stacked atop it.

I'm not sure people really ever respected him, or JavaScript for that matter, but sort of just recognized it can pay to pay attention to one of the most popular languages and the man who invented it.

He also founded and built Mozilla, which arguably saved the open web from extinction.

If you don't respect the founder of JavaScript and Mozilla, your standards are very high. I doubt many people commenting here would meet them.

Look, if given a chance, I'd shake his hand. But that doesn't mean I hold him to high regard or agree with his views, standards, or ideals. I respect some of the things he's done, but I also disrespect other things he's done.

Mozilla is pretty cool I guess, JavaScript is pretty cool I guess. It's all really just whatever and I think he was very much in the right place at the right time for a lot of this, not that he isn't a brilliant man who's obviously far more accomplished than me.

> He also founded and built Mozilla, which arguably saved the open web from extinction.

There was already a better open-source web rendering engine and browser at the time. Maybe we'd've got a KHTML-based browser on Windows much sooner that would have filled the same role.

Creating JS in two weeks was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately we'd be better off if he had been a worse developer, because then Netscape wouldn't have had the option of shipping it and enshrining its defects as features.

Not to mention his support for prop 8 and pathetic excuse for an apology.

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