AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:23 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
Parent article: Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

Hi folks,

I think the web took a wrong turn with the advent of Javascript, and has proceeded down that wrong path since. Just considering the abysmal performance (having various Android devices, I don't like Java either), the lack of a separation between model, view, and controller, and the fact that the language is sort of a throwback to the '80's.

I know it's bad to say everybody else is nuts, but looking at all of this cruft, that's exactly what I think.

Bruce

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AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 1:37 UTC (Tue) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

MVC separation is a function of application design, not language.

I miss the rigor of C++ but love the fact that in Javascript I can write an application with a tenth of the code and spending most of my time thinking about application logic rather than nuts and bolts.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 4:22 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

Certainly the platform can facilitate MVC or even enforce it to some extent, and most languages come with a platform of their own these days. For example Ruby on Rails really does enforce that each of M V and C are in separate files. You can mix them together if you try, but you are guided to do things the right way by the platform.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:23 UTC (Tue) by andreashappe (subscriber, #4810) [Link]

In the same spirit you could have pointed to http://www.angularjs.org/ or http://backbonejs.org/ as examples of javascript frameworks that lead to MVC patterns.

I still don't like Javascript, but MVC is a framework (not language) inherent pattern.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 2:13 UTC (Tue) by artem (subscriber, #51262) [Link]

I think that the influence and importance of one particular language is much less than you'd think. Yes it took about 20 years for the collective mind of average developer to figure out which parts of javascript are good and which are bad, but once you get into the habit of using right idioms it's not actually that bad - there are languages in wide use today that are *much* worse.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 3:45 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

You're going to have to come up with better reasons than performance (modern JS engines are some of the fastest out there, even before considering asm.js), MVC (all the cool-kid frameworks that I know nothing about, like Backbone.js and Knockout.js, are about exactly this), and the language (JavaScript: The Good Parts, ECMAScript 6, CoffeeScript and every other ThisScript and ThatScript, etc.).

There are probably valid arguments, but those aren't them.

(Also, speaking of languages that are a throwback to the '80s, have you heard what Apple's language of choice is???)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 5:51 UTC (Tue) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link] (3 responses)

I think JS is just the latest link in a long chain. Every time we standardize worldwide, it creates a new platform and we reinvent everything on top of that. We layered all networking (even local networking) over IP, we layered all protocols (even stateless ones) over TCP, we layered all protocols again over HTTP, now we're doing it with JSON.

In the same time frame we've created the "standard app suite" again and again, with more layers under it every time. Running the apps in a web browser is just another link in that chain. And now these chains are merging. Perhaps now, finally, something different will happen :)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 21:25 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

Just today I wrote a boneheaded client for WS-ReliableMessaging, which appears to layer something like TCP on top of XML on top of SOAP on top of HTTP on top of TCP on top of IP on top of whatever.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 21:26 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Criminy, SOAP and XML should be swapped in that order.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 3, 2013 2:44 UTC (Wed) by bbaetz (subscriber, #42501) [Link]

> Criminy, SOAP and XML should be swapped in that order.

I'm not sure that that clarification improves the situation...

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 7:00 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

No, you're not the only one.

Feels good to know you on my side ;-)

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 8:52 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

It depends on what one calls a model. If the model is JSON-like data and the view is generated HTML+CSS, then the JS have very nice separation. In fact it is better than many C++/Java frameworks as JS view is not updated until the whole code that is triggered by the current event is run. Effectively in JS one can get very complex updates without any flicker.

Also JS allows nicely preserve GUI state with #bookmarks which gives as a bonus an extra way to navigate the GUI using the address bar. Just try that that in any native application - most of them have hard time recovering just the state where they were before the user closed them.

AM I THE ONLY ONE?

Posted Jul 2, 2013 23:40 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

MVC is overrated and in general a bad idea. I haven't seen any advanced applications with fully decoupled view and model.

And JS has very nice frameworks, like http://knockoutjs.com/ that beat almost all 'classical' UI frameworks in usability.

Things have advanced

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:00 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Bruce, it sounds like you haven't actually tried the brave new world of JavaScript development. JavaScript was created to be "Scheme on the browser", but things have advanced a lot from the old browser demos.

For the record, which are your language and platform of choice?