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Comment by leetharris | Hacker News Reader

This is so cool.

I love to see Javascript used for stuff like this. It blew my mind that the James Webb Telescope uses a custom Javascript runtime for a lot of the onboard functions.

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The SpaceX Dragon capsule touchscreens run an HTML/JS app built using web components (Polymer) :D

That's mind blowing, so I looked it up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454

Still not sure why they chose JavaScript.

According to their paper it's a commercial JavaScript engine however:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...

Why do you love to see a particular language used for something?

It would be like being excited at seeing someone using aluminum to build something over steel/wood/etc.

Not the parent, but I like seeing particular languages used for something like this because it may be a langauge that I am familiar with along with all of its libraries and tooling. This makes a project like this that interacts with hardware easier to acheive.

tribes

What a cynical take, especially here in a community that should be celebrating novel uses of technology, whether it would be your choice or not.

There is nothing new about using JS for UI, as that is the only place it belongs.

It's also intresting to see a language used in a way it's not intended to necessarily our for a creative/unique use. Why do people like to port doom to random devices, because it was never indended to run on those (and it's a challenge/meme at this point)

to speak to your example: my girlfriend's dad was a welder on aluminum boats. he is always excited to see aluminum boats, find out who built them, etc.

Sorry, late reply, but I think it's still worth answering.

I think Javascript is a really fun language. I've done a lot of embedded C and it can be... exhausting? I would love to try Javascript on an embedded system, IoT device, etc. I'll bet a lot of the most annoying stuff can be abstracted away pretty easily on modern hardware.

That's horrifying. Javascript doesn't belong anywhere near anything which isn't a web page, and even then it's questionable.

Maybe the engineers at NASA know what they're doing?

As a JavaScript hater, I admit they surely they do, but I'm still curious as to why it was the best choice. If it's a custom runtime, existing runtimes being reliable\secure\well understood by existing engineers isn't relevant. And it's not like they're adding in lots of external libraries either.

I found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454

" The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC"

but I still don't understand. Interesting they went with a language that doesn't even have integers.

At least the comments on this reddit thread have some hilarious jokes:

https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_jame...

Looks like they released a paper, the abstract of which, indicates it's not a fully custom runtime, which would make more sense:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...

Unfortunately they want money to read the rest of it and I'm curious but not that curious, and I probably wouldn't understand it anyway.

It's a very readable paper. The paper's DOI is 10.1117/12.671403, and you can read it for free on Sci Hub.

Thanks. Yeah, I thought of that, but I'm at work at a place where I very much should not be having Sci Hub in my browsing log.

no one's doubting it, but they still want to know the reason because it goes contrary to the expectations of most developers here, even the JavaScript fans

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