Pherdnut

I wasn't really trying. I mostly write JavaScript or try to bite through the arteries in my wrists while suffering through other people's Java and C#.

I salute this man. And I still don't know wtf Monads are.

I'm still not seeing how that makes warrantless secret surveillance with gag orders and secret courts reporting to special committees not a threat to democracy.

I never denied pissing in CNET's coffee either.

Introversion doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with shy. I just don't want to deal 25 assholes at the same time. I don't get a charge out of that. Once conversations involve more than three it's like the gonads start swinging or something and I lose interest. A confident introvert is a natural leader. I don't even get why this is some sort of revelation.

YAYYY!!! Okaynowwhydothebenchmarkssuck.

I see him as more of a responsible citizen with a big brass pair. It's the 50+% who apparently don't mind what's going on as long as it keeps them safe from terrorism that I consider traitors.

Are the CIA basically the not-so-bad guys now? Seems like they haven't been busted for doing anything super-nasty lately.

If only we had static types, we could do something like this with JavaScript.

Why does it have to be a warning to publishers? Clearly customers keep coming back or they wouldn't keep repeating the same idiotic behavior. I'm not sure I feel sorry for anybody in this case other than the guy who was such a non-gamer he never heard of DRM.

The only part of JavaScript that's tied to working with web UI is the DOM API, which isn't even a part of the ECMAScript standard but rather set by the W3C and meant to be language-independent. I think Python could have worked out on the client-side but there were other options and none of them lasted. Give JS a more serious look. You might be surprised to discover that it has some unique features that make it attractive as a general-use language. I think JS has a lot to do with why people suddenly wanted closures in Java or that they implemented proper first class funcs in C#. It's exceptionally good at event-driven paradigms, normalization and reducing complexity, which is exactly what was needed on the client-side but also serves as a powerful feature-set in general use IMO. It's good at letting you set your own paradigm. If you don't love callback-passing-intensive code, that's something you can bury under an interface that appeals to you more.

I've only looked at it but I know people who are into it and I'm not aware of Angular compiling anything. There's this crap they do with the "DOM-compiling" or whatever but that has little to do with rewriting JS or compiling AFAIK. That's just Google engineers wanting to feel like they have their big boy pants on when they talk about their JS framework.

Most of whom? I came up in JS on the client-side. Nothing has been more frustrating over the years than watching all of the inflexible bloat and tightly coupled BS people have been piling on to the client-side in order to pretend it was something that it is not. Web forms sucked ass. Everything Java tried to do to pretend the client-side wasn't there has left massive legacy potholes all over the web. Just deal with the thing as it is already and learn something new. You're a programmer for chrissakes. I might indulge in writing OS apps with webkit but I don't try to add a server to the process if it's just a local desktop app in order to make it more like what I'm used to. HTML, CSS and JS properly applied are doing 4/5ths of what these frameworks are pointlessly reinventing. All you have to do is learn them properly. The rest, keeping data loosely coupled, is basic 'duh' OOP. All the stuff that's already there works surprisingly well if you actually give it a chance. Or have you not noticed that web technology solutions are spreading like wildfire into other domains or that we can implement and modify GUIs using client-side-web-technology a lot faster than desktop OS UI developers have ever been able to? FFS, they don't deliver on that desire because it's proven time and time again to be a complete waste of time to try to.

Uh, you were the one who suggested JS wasn't OOP-oriented. It's all JS to me. jQuery is just a function that's spits out adapter/decorator objects. Just as Angular, Knockout, Backbone, Ember, etc... are all just bloatworks that miss one critical point. We already had the V and the C pretty well covered. They're throwing a big veil of abstraction over one that was already there and worked fine. It's like webforms all over again only this time we're trying to pretend the client-side isn't already what it is rather than not there at all. And while yes, IMO, we should think of web apps as two separate apps, the client-side's concerns are localized enough that it's kind of silly to try and apply MVC to it (not that what any of this stuff does can really be called MVC or MV-whatever anyway). What is it with modern developers wanting frameworks to be the answer before they understood the question in the question in the first place? How do you even write this stuff without starting to feel a lot silly about the fact that you're just duplicating effort? Because at some point they all have to bind with the mechanisms already in place to bind to their own bindings and that's just stupid.

I'm confused by all of these MVetc... libraries. We had routing behavior to content/views covered already. How is anything that does more than help isolate/manage data more than cruft in regards to having some sort of MVC-but-not-really-style-app on the client-side-web? IMO, it's all just pointless abstraction of the type that JS devs should have learned to avoid from observing server-side fail over the years. What really blows my mind is the number of these frameworks that embed pointless behavior dependencies directly in the HTML and act like they're doing us a favor. That's awesome, now we're back to changing things in multiple places to make adjustments to our apps that used to happen in one place following basic "duh" best practices that the authors of these frameworks don't appear to have ever understood properly. HTML is the router you saps! Hell, how about we add pointless-in-a-language-with-first-class-function IOC fail, config files and pointless dependency management as well? Wait WHAT!? ARE YOU !@#$ING SERIOUS!?

I don't really get the point of coffeescript at all tbh. JS is one of the most flexible languages in heavy use right now.

This is a trend that may actually reverse in the next couple of years. JQuery's popularity has inspired a lot of new DOM API methods now present in modern browsers which are starting to make it somewhat redundant. Once IE8 is out of your support picture the major DOM API normalization issues (events in particular) are out of the way.

The only reason I can think of to use JQuery beyond that is that it's a dependency for a lot of libraries you use, you're supporting something other than Android/iOS on mobile or you really, really like the extras like animate, their powerful event system, extend and/or their ajax methods.

That said, it's popularized a lot of useful coding methods, showed everybody how normalization should be done, and demonstrated the power of closures/factory functions to keep objects very light-weight in spite of having a ton of functionality associated with them. It's not just for client-side-illiterate noobs. Studying JQ under the hood can teach a lot about JQ.

The newer JS libraries/frameworks/tools are concerning themselves more with how to implement highly complex UI in an app-maintainable way.

I'd give them license to be total jerks about it if they'd just deliver the death blow to Office already.

I thought it was news media that was becoming largely irrelevant for being hopelessly out of touch with modern media trends. I mean, hasn't TV been getting better, not worse in the last 20 years?

Weren't they booming before the economy tanked? They're small, dirt cheap and you can get online with 'em. That's not a hard sell no matter what the economy.

I'm a web developer who once worked as a low-level IT guy and I'm sorry but the excuses in the ZD comments just aren't flying with me.

First of all, any app that breaks in everything but IE 6 was written by somebody who is incompetent. Any business whose success hinges on such an app was equally incompetent in choosing it.

And let me make this very clear. We write our apps for modern browsers first and then fix the various flukes and oversights that have made IE 6 such a royal pain to deal with last and we are doing so in even quicker and dirtier ways the longer it drags on. I work at a major retailer that was probably also late in upgrading from IE 6 and even our managers are sick of hearing about what we can't do because IE 6 has market share and have stopped caring if people get an obviously subpar or uglier experience on that ridiculous browser if it shaves a week or two off of development.

And what, you're worried about security? That's why you're sticking it out with IE 6 and an ancient version of Outlook? Please.

Any IT department that's still on IE 6 is being run by somebody who was probably more attracted to IT for the favorable pay to training ratio and who has too little faith in their abilities and the abilities of the people they're responsible for to upgrade a freaking browser for crying out loud.

I don't care about how big your networks are. I don't care about your ridiculous IE 6-only apps that you should have been searching for alternatives to six months after IE 7 came out and you still didn't get updates from the "developers" (hacks with a GUI IDE of some sort more likely). If you're still on IE 6 you're not really interested in information technology, you don't know what you're doing and it's no surprise that management has started favoring cheap labor from overseas over homegrown incompetence. It's not like you're any better at communicating or have fewer excuses than some guy they picked up off the street in India anyway.

Cheap shot? Sure it is but how come nobody is coming after my job? It's not like JavaScript syntax is hard or anything right? If IT professionals were doing what they ought to be doing, which is continually honing their skills and improving the productivity of businesses rather than holding them back for fear of revealing their own incompetence they'd be seen as an asset rather than a necessary evil and an expense.

If your business is still on IE 6, whoever is responsible doesn't deserve their job as far as I'm concerned.