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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

so, I'm a little confused here - more than a year ago, the Gnome Project picked Javascript as its primary dev language and it was linked here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5169599)

That entire thread is around how Javascript is a bad paradigm for desktop. But, this entire thread is how amazing javascript is going to be for OSX.

Let me add that the JS programming model of Gnome is what powers http://extensions.gnome.org - and I have my own extensions in there. Also (and correct me if I'm wrong) the "GObject Introspection" mechanism is fairly analogous to OSA.

So, is there a underlying technical or implementation issue that makes it good on OSX and bad on Gnome ? use case? technology ? OSA ?

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They're very different use cases.

Applescript is used for automation of already existing applications which will still be written in C++ or Objective C. Applescript, a proprietary language with no other uses, is just being replaced by a much more common language in Javascript so people won't need to learn a new one to automate apps. People don't generally write applications using Applescript and they probably won't be using Javascript, so there's little overlap.

In GNOME Javascript is being used to write the applications in the first place. There is total overlap between Javascript and C/C++.

People see the GNOME choice as both redundant and reducing performance of desktop apps while people see the Apple choice as simply using a common language instead of a proprietary one for scripting.

not entirely true. Gnome has a first class language - Vala [1] - that is for writing performant system level applications. And the community is quite active as well - https://github.com/trending?l=vala

If you think of automation, there have been attempts at bringing flow based programming to the Gnome-JS engine (think of it as Quartz Composer integrated into the desktop) [3] - plus the fact that http://extensions.gnome.org is about as automatic as you can get to customize the desktop.

Is it a difference in positioning ? Because honestly I'm a little befuddled on why all the developers on HN get supremely excited about JS on OSX... and not something like NoFlo.js integrated into Gnome.

[1] https://github.com/GNOME/vala [2] http://lethalman.hostei.com/maja/index.html [3] http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/noflo-and-gnome/

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