Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

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There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction

My objection is right here. No need to mix in the Objective-J at all.

Microsoft's ASP.NET tried to do this thing, to a surprising amount of success. The context then ofcourse was "Web 1.0" pre-Digg internet and the only other "big thing" being PHP.

Microsoft managed to take the whole "Draw a GUI in Visual Studio and it's a done app" thing and take it to the web, much like it originally defined Windows-programming with Visual Basic. It was an immense success and very cool.

Then Web 2.0 (as much as I hate that term) came and changed the game.

Then not working on the raw metal became an obstacle to making ASP.NET do all those cool things which everyone else was doing. It's killer feature (not having to know HTML) became it's Achilles Heel. It's abstractions became a hinderance to all the things you actually knew how to do once the framework got out of your way.

I may be a tad pessimistic and cynical, but I doubt a framework whose main goal is to give you a non-webby workspace will be a long term success when you're actually working on the web.

Microsoft learned that (too late?) and have tried to remedy the situation with ASP.NET MVC, but by the time that became useful, it seems lots of .NET developers went off to find cool stuff elsewhere.

A new framework like that, right now, seems like an utterly dead end.

Every time I see someone talking about using JavaScript as working "on the raw metal" I die a little bit inside.

I'm joining OP's web haters club, if he starts one.

The metaphor is apt. JS is a terrible terrible language (with some nice features). It's very easy to do the wrong thing. It's very hard to organize large projects and it needs higher level frameworks to be usable and portable. And with projects like asm.js it will be a necessity (not an option) to write in a higher-level language in order to generate performant JS web apps. So the "raw metal" metaphor is apt.

"I die a little bit inside."

Every time I hear a programmer condescend towards other programmers for using a higher level language, I also die a little bit inside.

How is javascript not the "metal" of the web? It's a core part of the modern web experience upon which many libraries and frameworks have been built.

I don't understand why that analogy is bad and is worthy of your condescension.

Are you just being condescending to the entire web paradigm in general?

PFFFT!

A language interpreted at runtime, by an application that runs inside an operating system (which may or may not be virtualized) that boots into protected mode. Let me get this straight, you're ostensibly describing this as being "bare metal"?

Have you ever heard the terms "kernel mode" or "ring zero"?

Oh wait, you qualified it as "the 'metal' of the web"... so it's an "analogy". Sorry to be pedantic, but when people say "bare metal" in the context of platform virtualiztion, "bare metal" literally means just that. The executable code is compiled into binary that directly correlates to the copper wires (and etched semi-conductors, or perhaps even vacuum tubes) of the specific, real, tangible machine intended to execute the code. JavaScript is nothing like this.

Maybe the packets and datagrams of transmission protocols are the "bare metal of the web", but JavaScript most certainly is not.

Check out the Communication Systems OSI Model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

I'd contend that nothing above Layer 4 could be considered analogous to "bare metal".

> The executable code is compiled into binary that directly correlates to the copper wires (and etched semi-conductors, or perhaps even vacuum tubes) of the specific, real, tangible machine intended to execute the code.

You do realize it's been a while time since the ostensible instruction set and corresponding assembly language of most modern CPUs translated directly to the bare metal execution model of the machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86#Current_implementations Even on RISCier architectures, virtual memory, deep instruction pipelining, super-scaler dispatch, branch prediction, multi-layer caching, inter-core cache coherency, etc. introduce a huge amount of abstraction between the instruction you write and the actual execution on "bare metal".

On current chips, x86 machine code is as much a virtual machine as java byte-code. It's abstractions all the way down, you just pick different levels for different classes of work and "bare metal" is now just a label for one below where you landed.

>On current chips, x86 machine code is as much a virtual machine as java byte-code.

I understand what you're trying to say, but this is way off base. x86 instructions may not align exactly a processor's primitive operations, but that doesn't mean abstraction makes x86 similar to the JVM, at least not anymore than it is similar to a Bible printed on papyrus. But nobody cares if ancient Hebrew is just as much a virtual machine as Java, so stfu.

You should leave out the stfu next time. You comment stand on it's own without it.

You're really reading too much into his analogy; it was a quick informal way to get a point across and everyone (should have?) understood what he meant.

Silicon isn't technically a metal anyways ;) A metalloid at best. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalloid

"Sometimes writing markdown feels like working on the bare metalloid"

Ha! Okay, ya got meh!

But! IN THEORY You could still construct a processor out of electromagnetic relays (springs, contacts, leads and solenoids only), if perhaps your goal was to never exceed 100 Hz.

(...at first I was going to point out http://www.bigmessowires.com but it turns out that beyond the wire wrap connections, he's still using modern semi-conductor packages)

I think you're on your way to praising the god particle: http://abstrusegoose.com/98

Well, to start, it's a scripting language, not a compiled language. At least on the web.

JavaScript is compiled by every modern browser, in fact it has some of the most advanced compilers that are out there. And the dichotomy of "scripting" vs compiled languages is false. You may be thinking of dynamic and static typing.

Nope, it's (JIT) compiled. No modern browser uses an interpreter anymore.

Javascript is to the web what assembler is for hardware.

As far as I know, Microsoft's ASP.NET was kind of a failure. It produced Frontpage-grade (e.g. dirty) html. It did the wrong thing by default and didn't help much with the right thing.

It also brought in some clueless people who had no idea how HTTP, HTML and JS work, with questions like "why my button.hover event does not work" (this was pre-ajax, the event code was on the server and had no ways of knowing the user is hovering over the button).

Maybe it was OK for CRUD and internal applications but not for ordinary websites or sophisticated web apps.

.Net MVC is seen as a success: clean HTML, predictable things under the hood, jquery.

> Microsoft's ASP.NET was kind of a failure.

Eventually, yes. Which I addressed. But prior to the whole Web 2.0-thing, it was actually pretty successful by lots of means.

I'm not saying ASP.NET MVC is superior in most respects. There's no doubt about that, but it was clearly a late-started initiative which should have started much earlier. ASP.NET already had lost its respect and was a waning star by the time they got the first version out the door.

These days it's actually fairly pleasant to work with. The only thing I can say I really dislike about it is that you can still find the traces of all the old ASP.NET warts there, if you go beneath the hood.

Edit: Thanks for being the only one replying to the actual topic at hand, as opposed to doing inane discussions about what "real metal" is these days. And that's coming from someone with a degree in electrical engineering and design of digital electrical circuitry.

You've nailed it. From another aspect frameworks and abstracting libraries are designed for reusable assets, paradigms, and resources. This is great if you want to create cookie-cutter websites, like corporate CMSs.

This style of thinking damages applications. Yeah you've made it easy to build a form with validation, but users don't need half the form fields, let alone the form itself. Also if you thought about it, you could have came up with a more innovative way to capture user data that would lead to more registrations, and thus more users.

I think ASP.NETs popularity wasn't because developers thought it was cool, it was because Microsoft was very effective at selling it to management. What better sales pitch than to suggest you could whip up a "rich" business application with a series of drag and drops and a few tweaks to the code, in no time at all!

Oracle are doing similar things these days too.

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