Hacker News Reader

I sincerely doubt the "small effort" part.

I think that by now, not many people consider JavaScript 'alien technology', or don't believe you can do clever stuff with it.

I don't mind the 'X in 30 lines of JavaScript' articles at all, they're nice curiosities. That said, let's not pretend JavaScript is unique in its ability to do a lot in very few lines of code. I've seen more impressive raytracers written in just as few lines of C for example, Perl one-liners that draw a live analog clock on the console, competent Python web services in less than 100 lines of code, etc.

^^^ Of course. I've actually wrote a minimalistic ruby library, then done the same library in javascript in similar code..just a nice curiosity.

Yes and I also view them as PoC to get rid of Adobe Flash eventually down the line.