"Javascript is the most familiar language out there at the moment"
Will people ever stop using this reasoning? Why not pick the best/better language instead?
Will people ever stop using this reasoning? Why not pick the best/better language instead?
Mind that term, actually: while French itself was just an average European language, it was handy, for political reasons, for diplomats of all stripes to pick up—and somewhat easy, presuming you had studied texts in Latin. JS is much the same: a lot of us might not prefer it when writing our own code, but we can all certainly read it, given its ALGOL derivation, and it's certainly more pithy than, say, C, for communicating the kind of concepts we need to communicate (like FRP.)
Mind that term even more, because despite the similar "fr--" sound, it does not actually denote the French language.
"Lingua franca" is actually an Italian term for "Frankish language", during a time (post-middle-ages) when "Franks" often referred to Western Europe in general.
While French is an example of a language which fit the definition for a period of time, it is not the source of its name.
First, most everybody has a JS engine handy, right in the browser of his choice. JS is reasonably standardized - the subset of it which is common between all browsers is pretty big. Then, JS is rather well known, since all web development has to include that - and that's a sizeable part of all development. Next, the language itself isn't that bad - you may write procedural, object-oriented or functional code relatively easy. Even better, the implementations are quite good lately, being forced to evolve under the pressure of demand.
Can you name a language which would best JavaScript in all these points?
> Can you name a language which would best JavaScript in
> all these points?
I don't know if English is better or worse than Lithuanian, but none of that probably factored into your decision to speak English here rather than your mother tongue. Like many of the other non-English speakers I see on HN, I don't assume you are saying English is a superior language, rather I assume it is that you see as English is the lingua-fanca of the world currently, you want to lower barriers to understanding your concepts and communicate to the widest audience possible. If that is why they chose JavaScript, then to me, that's a rational choice.
http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~imaier/pub/DeprecatingObserversTR201...
It's straightly viewn from an implementor's perspective in my opinion.
Tl:Dr.: The observer-pattern is bad and encourages callback-hell, therefore a Data-Flow DSL is implemented to control the order of evaluation. It's kind of showing the implementation of an IO-Monad.
Not sure what the alternative would be.Python/C/C++ on linux maybe.
But on Windows? what language does Windows support from scratch that Linux supports?
And since everybody knows Javascript... Not saying I like the language but it became easy to explain something in a language everybody can read through js.
That and it's very applicable to current problems with web-based programming of the coordination of events, promises, and any other I/O such as Web Sockets, XHRs, etc.