Not having a bundled set of widgets is probably an advantage, flexibility wise.
People like to bash (ha!) JavaScript, but I think it’s begginer friendliness is often overlooked. Just look at how easy it is to get something done compared to Java in the browser.
That and load time probably contributed to its success more than anything else.
Neither is inherently less secure than javascript running in a web browser.
> and poorly integrated with the rest of the stack.
Yeah, but, so? Maybe I'm too old and curmudgeonly but I preferred it when applications acted like applications and websites acted like websites. Now I have to deal with websites that are half application, without the responsiveness of either and built on a pile of franken-code.
Why do you think that? I’ve heard a lot of vulnerabilities in Java and Flash plugins but JavaScript not so much.
Thing is the browser engines where are not so diligent about CVE's and they are necessary evil, while Java/Flash where optional evil. With the Flash plugin being significantly worse quality than the Java ones.
Truly this is the progress we all hoped to see in computing in 2018.
Back then I was writing applets for science education that would do things like send a mesh to a finite element solver and get the mesh back with stress information.
Back then 2/3 of the code and most of the loading time came from hand-written code to serialize and deserialize data structures. Eg. an applet could have been small and fast loading if serialization was built into the platform.
Java 1.1 added serialization, but it took a long time to get into browsers, Netscape added their own lame serialization scheme, etc... By then the rot was already setting in.
Isn't JavaScript code written by beginners almost as bug-prone as C/C++ code is? I wouldn't rely on code written by a beginner unless it is written in a strongly-typed mostly immutable functional language.
Unless the op, just meant getting "hello world" on the screen from an HTML file, but that is a meaningless metric imo.
Writing a web app in JS is hard, getting the workflow all sorted, and then writing bugfree code. IS more a herculean task than "beginner friendly"
The node, webpack, react stuff is very complicated indeed