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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

Great idea.

Why stop there? I say let's make "if" conditions randomly work on false values 1/1000th of the time. That will teach them.

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This is a straw man argument. Randomly breaking stuff for the sake of breaking stuff is not what this is about. This update had a clear intent and only "broke the web" for sites running code that was already risking breakage by deploying an anti-pattern, namely blocking on scroll!

I'm no believer in Google's faux-altruism, much less sympathetic to their cause (see: AMP). The rollout could've been less agressive, sure. But I don't think equating a step towards sane default behavior with wrench-in-the-gears chaos adds much to the discussion.

This is not a straw man argument. See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635929

It would be a straw man argument as a reply to the article, but it's a reply to a comment that advocates breaking the JS to make developers use it less.

I think that's a mischaracterization of the comment's argument, despite its perhaps simplistic language. Maybe I'm wrong but given the context the spirit of the argument seems to be "let's load less shitty JS," i.e. less code that does stuff like block on scroll. So in my view the argument is really not about the developer experience at all; it's about encouraging code with concrete benefits for the end-user. Breaking "if" semantics is just inducing chaos to no one's benefit.

There is no adjective or other qualifier in the original comment. You're reading it in.

If you need more clarity, see the same commenter's "JS is a pox on the web" comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636056

You're being sarcastic, but this is a great idea. Let's do it.

You have an interesting point of view. Why do you feel this way?

I think JavaScript is largely a pox on the web. I hate almost every website I come across today. I just try to ignore all of the bullshit for as long as it takes to consume the actual content, and 95% of the bullshit is possible thanks to JavaScript.

Do you think if JS weren't available advertisers and marketers wouldn't try everything to shake some $ off your pocket? You would be pissed the same way.

Also if it weren't JS, would it make a difference if the bullshit is created by lisp, java or erlang?

It it were lisp, java, or erlang I'd still be pissed. The web should not have a client-side scripting language.

You never use or benefit from any web apps that take advantage of javascript?

I almost never use web apps that couldn't be done without JavaScript.

I'm with you.

A UI markup language could define forms that are "desktop-like" without involving a Turing complete language.

The paradigm of the HTML form with controls and a submit action has not been developed to its full potential, because it was basically derailed by JS.

It could have a lot more widgets, and there could be some standard way they exchange and validate data, without a full-blown client-side programming language.

For instance, say you want the user to pick a date. There could be a standard widget in HTML for doing that that could be dropped into a form, and it could be configured to communicate its value bi-directionally with some other field. (Perhaps like cells in a spreadsheet or that sort of reactive thing.) A rich set of standard widgets with flexible styling and layout, communicating the content of the data model to and from the server. Something like that.

That's just laughable. Somebody at some point would have created an alternative browser with client side scripting. Otherwise you end up with static text and video. Wonderful. And plugins! Because you don't allow scripts :)

I don't think that it was a mistake at the time. I think that in retrospect it has been abused, and many of the things that justified it are now possible without it. It should be deprecated and removed.

Yes, I know this is a fool's errand. I don't actually expect this to happen.

I'm with Sir_Cmpwn here (although I too realize it's a fool's errand, unfortunately).

90% of what I use the web for is static text and video. And I could live without video. :)

Hahah I was but since you put it this way I thought what would happen and it would be glorious.

But you know whats gonna happen right? Someone will create a “jqif” library that will run same if 10 times (maybe throw in a transpiler) or whatever then we’ll have 10 times slower javascript that fails with 1/10^11 chance.

Js is here to stay unfortunately.

We kinda have this already: one in every 1000th JavaScript website breaks the back button.

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