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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

> it seems incredibly naive in hindsight

Oh stop with the dramatics, please. JS has brought us an immense amount of innovation on the web. It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development.

If you're on HN the odds are that directly or indirectly, JS is one of the reasons you have a job today, and that you can execute it remotely. And today specifically, it's the only reason many kids can do remote learning as efficiently as they can.

Dude/dudette, I'm not a big fan of JS but let's recognize the good it has brought on the world, instead of complaining in the likes of what amounts to "if only we still lived in caves, we wouldn't have those pesky problems with online advertising" or something.

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It can have been incredibly naive and have brought great benefit at the same time. In the 1990s did we foresee that in 2021, tracking our individual web activity and building profiles of our behavior would be a pillar of the business model supporting most of the online economy? Did we foresee that we would be looking to government regulation to prevent comprehensive profiles of our individual web browsing activity from being sold by private companies, and bought not only by other private companies but by government agencies as well? No? Then I think we were, in hindsight, naive. I'm not denying any of the benefits of Javascript by saying that. We did not foresee all of the upside of Javascript, but we were naive about the costs, too.

Not predicting what will happen thirty years hence is naive? The web was all shiny goodness and going to be a panacea for anything you could name back in the late 90s. The fact that it did not come to pass isn’t naïveté so much as a disappointing repeat of what our current economic systems of reward drive companies to do.

The general pattern was predictable - I was involved in making an early ad blocker in 1996. Adbusters magazine was a thing then.

Technically, the detail of super-cookies is inventive and surprising. The general trend for how capitalism inevitably both uses and abuses advertising was predictable.

>JS has brought us an immense amount of innovation on the web. It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development.

JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. On the contrary, programming with VisualBasic and SQL was 10 times more accessible and productive than web development. What enabled millions to write software was the availability of computers in every household.

What the Web did was revolutionise software distribution. After making a change to my 1990s style VB program I had to pack a stack of floppy disks and travel to my customer to install the new version on their PCs, migrate the data, make sure everything still worked in spite of other programs installing an overlapping set of DLLs, etc.

With the Web, we took a massive hit in terms of developer productivity and complexity, but the distribution model trumped absolutely everything. It also made things possible that would have been completely unthinkable, such as running software made by a large number of developers you don't know and don't necessarily trust with all your data.

To this day, the Web is the only reasonably secure runtime environment that isn't centrally controlled by some gatekeeper with its own agenda.

So I actually agree with most of what you have said elsewhere in this thread. But I disagree about lowering the barrier for developers.

>JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. >But I disagree about lowering the barrier for developers.

I think OP meant it as browsers that run JS. The built in console is so useful for testing/practice. You can run JS without any setup on most popular OS - Win/Linux/Mac.

You can practice JS in console while viewing YouTube tutorial or following a JS blog/ Mozilla dev page.

I know that's what they meant, but I disagree that it lowered the barrier to creating actual applications or to getting into programming.

Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

But the difference was that you could also create proper applications with a UI, a database and (optionally!) some glue code.

We just had no good way of distributing our apps. Creating anything collaborative that wasn't restricted to a local network was exceedingly difficult as well.

The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

And if you're asking me why the number of developers exploded while the barriers to entry supposedly went up, my answer is that the new opportunities that came with unrestricted worldwide distribution of software trumped the narrower issue of writing that software in the first place.

>Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

Can't be everyone, how do you know the numbers? How many Office users actually used VB? MS famously stifled competition in internet browsers. 1990s numbers still won't give a fair picture.

>The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

Why blame the web for higher barrier to entry. JS is doing fine. See a few surveys for popular languages: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

https://madnight.github.io/githut/

I agree with simias.

What does JS have to do with my VPN? What was wrong with Skype? Still beats the pants off others for quality.

I cannot think of much good agressive whitespace, hamburger menus, infinite scrolling, HID hijacking, copy-paste preventing, trackers etc, etc etc, has brought us, besides into the world of Aggressive Ad Arbitrage.

Need https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ be mentioned?

The real powerhouse was Flash, then HTML5, and now WebAssembly, or as I like to call it, reinventing the wheel while simultaneously and conveniently blocking ad-blockers.

> I cannot think of much good...[JS] has brought us...

This has shades of "What have the Romans ever done for us".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZkTnJnLR0

Still waiting for the sanitation, aqueducts, roads, peace, etc...

So .. because you don't like design trends, you're saying JS is useless?

That's like saying wool is useless because you don't like modern fashion.

I like that the website you linked still has Google Analytics JS embedded.

F12 it ;)

It's states what it gets right: it's lightweight, accessible, compatible, responsive, legible and it works.

946ms for me. has google analytics

> WebAssembly, or as I like to call it, reinventing the wheel while simultaneously and conveniently blocking ad-blockers.

This meme needs to die.

WebAssembly doesn't prevent ad blocking at all. Ad blocking relies on blocking network requests for the most part, which can still absolutely be blocked when done by WASM.

Some ad blockers also optionally relies on removing DOM nodes for greater coverage. It's important to note that this technique is used to reduce visual clutter, but doesn't prevent tracking, and doesn't increase browsing performance as the ad still gets downloaded before being removed.

Yes, a purely canvas-based app could work around DOM blocking, but WASM has nothing to do with it: you can do pure canvas-based UIs in javascript too, that's what all the modern web games do.

You're blaming the language for how people use it. It's like saying C is bad because people use it to write root kits.

C is for writing trusted native code. JS is for writing untrusted code in a sandbox that is way too leaky.

It turns out: securing on network services is a PITA that school network admins don't need more of; developing good ones is expensive and is best outsourced to a SaaS; on network/on device resources need more extensive vetting than web resources; on network/device resources take days to try out and roll out with cooperation of the understaffed IT team, web resources take one class and a link.

Skype is superceeded by a half dozen more targetted classroom video chats - none of which need installing or require the kids to have accounts.

From the perspective of more easily deployable apps that are more useful to end users, WebAsm > HTML5 > Flash. The fact the ad monopolies run our major web developments is convenient for them to piggyback these changes, but isn't the drive for them.

> It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development.

I think Basic, Pascal or Python achieved more at that.

> it's the only reason many kids can do remote learning as efficiently as they can.

The main reason is internets and TCP/IP, that’s essential and irreplaceable. Another important reason is h.264, equivalents do exist, but given the state of hardware acceleration it’s irreplaceable, at least not on mobile devices.

JavaScript ain’t an essential tech, as it’s replaceable on both clients and servers. Your kids would learn equally efficiently using a native app instead of these JS-rich web sites.

I've worked with python 17 years. I've taught python, javascript and typescript. There is a universe between how accessible JS is vs Python.

And TCPIP may have helped but just because it's essential part of the stack doesn't mean the remote learning could have happened without JS existing (in the time it did). The web would be a glorified FTP server if some people here had their way.

As a Python programmer myself I’m curious, what’s the difference?

Your language interpreter comes built-in with your computer

So "Download pycharm" is enough of a barrier that it creates a "universe of difference"? I find that hard to believe.

Yes, it is. You’re missing the step beforehand which is “know that you can download PyCharm.”

That's an entirely different question to whether it should be on by default for random sites, which is what GP is actually talking about. I would go farther and say that there was never a time that it looked reasonable.

Don't you think JS being so available is part of what made it so popular, and thus what made it accessible, and what brought programming to millions who wouldn't have done it otherwise?

I think that asking users "do you want to let this site run JavaScript?" would have been an acceptable trade-off in availability.

Look up alert fatigue.

I've heard of it, actually. I don't think that's a good reason to enable JavaScript by default any more than it's a good reason to give webpages access to my camera, microphone, and filesystem by default.

Good things are happening in spite of JS, not because of it. It's a silly language, the type system is atrocious, and the entire ecosystem is a joke (look at the left-pad incident).

Typescript has an excellent type system and one of the best development environments the entire dev world can use. You know what ecosystem it's a part of? The JS one. That "entire" one you're talking about has produced superb work such as React, V8, is pretty much responsible for Rust existing, and so on.

JS has dumb flaws. It doesn't mean anything is happening "in spite" of it. If anything, innovation is happening thanks to JS AND in spite of its flaws. But don't think for a second we would have even one tenth of the developers we have at our disposal today if JS and the internet didn't massively lower that barrier of entry. And less developers means less progress overall in the entire industry, not just less left-hand libraries.

> Typescript has an excellent type system

It has a type system. "Excellent" feels a bit strong.

https://blog.asana.com/2020/01/typescript-quirks/

https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/typescript/lessons/ty...

This feels like complaining about an "excellent" game because you found a couple of bugs in ...

That second article is legitimately cool though.

The criticism is about an executable/scripting code platform in the browser as an opt-out - nothing specific about the semantics of JS.

JS brought both problems and benefits. The fact that it brought benefits doesn't prove that it didn't bring problems.

I think we could have done better if we knew what we were doing.

This is just such a weird centrist point to make. Is there any substance to what you're saying other than "there's good and bad in everything"?

So did using computers in single user mode, but we wouldn't dare do that today. JS is, arguably, over-reaching and way too powerful for the web to be turned on by default.

The sad part is we're probably just one decent privacy bill away from making almost all of this go away. JS + an anti-regulatory political climate is the larger problem. The EU has tackled this heads on recently with its privacy laws. At a certain point, technical work-arounds just don't work and the bad commercial actors will always win unless there's regulation stop them.

> It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development.

And wasted zillions of man hours to relearn the latest web framework every 2 years. Good job JS. We all love you.

There were a variety of scripting languages.

You don't acknowledge the need to sandbox code, regardless of language.

Applications can exist outside of the web too.

That's not my point. You wouldn't have had the development speed we've had the last 30 years. You wouldn't have had the same amount of devs. The same pickup on the web. The same worldwide connectivity.

Javascript is one of the, if not the, most influential technologies of the past 100 years. It changed the course of history. Can you say the same of, like, wxWidgets or whatever UI toolkit you'd be using for your native app?

>Javascript is one of the, if not the, most influential technologies of the past 100 years.

That's... one hell of a claim.

I 100% stand behind it. It rivals everything I can think of and then some (the internet itself included).

JS is indeed what brought us all the speed in software development. People could prototype their ideas crazy fast, and they still can. Scripting in browser had an immense positive impact on software industry, and that DID come with many negatives, but you always have the option to completely turn it off if those bother you.

A sandboxed environment was a huge idea and the browser has been the primary example of how great it can be. The app model in mobile with permission isolated access is more or less the proprietary re-implementations of the browser sandbox.

Prototyping fast does not guarantee shipping robust software fast, which is in part why the JS ecosystem has been having problems.

To apply the common construction analogy to JavaScript: no one would call a quick sketch on a napkin a valid blueprint for a building.

> (...) JS ecosystem has been having problems

what problems? Yeah, stuff like left-pad happened with NPM, but that has nothing to do with sandboxed scripting in browser. Also within my already-depressingly-long career, I had more problems with deploying "robust" .NET desktop apps (WPF & Forms) and even Qt based supposedly "cross-platform" apps than web apps. Web is the most robust platform I've ever worked with, and that's by a huge margin.

JS as a language has problems[1] but the idea behind it proved itself to be great.

[1]: and with the latest additions it's one of the better programming languages to work with, although the standard library sucks (or more like, nearly non-existent). But that's totally another topic.

Yes but if it was „incredibly naive“ to download and run JavaScript in the browser sandbox how naive would it have been to download and run native code outside of any sandbox?

The browser runtime is what enabled us to use software provided by a huge number of developers of varying aptitude and motivation without putting in place some centralised gatekeeper with its own vested interests.

> Yes but if it was „incredibly naive“ to download and run JavaScript in the browser sandbox how naive would it have been to download and run native code outside of any sandbox?

It would be naive to download and run native code for every website you visiti, yes. A few that you trust and where you think that is warranted is a different matter.

Running javascript in a sandbox provides the illusion of safety so it gets enabled by default while still creating tons of problems.

> A few that you trust and where you think that is warranted is a different matter.

We tried that, and the security issues it caused were orders of magnitude more severe than any of the problems caused by defects in an up-to-date browser sandbox. Basically all consumer PCs used to be infested with viruses all the time. It sparked an entire virus scanning industry.

It takes far too much discipline and diligence to make sure that you can trust the motivations and security capabilties of all your software providers. Sandboxing is good. It's the only thing short of the most heavy handed, restrictive and centralised control that has ever worked.

The security issues we have on today's Web are overwhelmingly unrelated to client-side security. The problem is protecting the data that is stored on servers and the incentives created by ad based business models. All of that is equally problematic regardless of whether you run native code or sandboxed JavaScript.

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