Just checking cos you've not explicitly said so: you're not calculating a price client-side and the trusting it server-side are you?

Eh? JavaScript is a fine language, it just has stupid bits that should be avoided. What don't you like about it?

It's a fine language which has been (historically) pisspoorly and inconsistently implemented/supported is the problem I think.

I mean, before jquery pretty much anything but the most simple of JS scripts had to start off with a huge block of conditional stuff to check which browser was being used and do stuff differently, depending. (And that's still there, just jquery handles it, thankfully).

I agree that DOM stuff has been inconsistent, and I totally understand why JavaScript has a bad reputation, it's just that the language itself (as opposed to the DOM interaction stuff) is actually really nice, and things like node.js are showing what it can do when separated from the browser.

Just to reinforce what Caer's saying - the reason for that book is to counter the bad attitude towards JavaScript.

If you take browsers and DOMs out of the picture, it's a rather nice language.

It's certainly not perfect - with crappy date handling, dodgy things like boolean objects, and so on - but it's generally no worse than any other language around today.

Lots of things. The fact that it's spelt JavaScript with the capital S for one. There are also lots of things I like about it that I wish other languages had, like closures / anonymous functions.

But the cross-platform compatibility even when using JQuery is a still more work than it should be. Without it, it's a fucking nightmare. And I'm not just talking DOM access / manipulation here. There are many, many more things that you remain blissfully unaware of until you start writing better JavaScript code, then suddenly you have to fight to make things work.

If ECMA International had complete control of the runtime interpreter that browsers and other platforms use to run JavaScript code, the same way only the PHP Group provide the runtime interpreter for PHP code and Sun Oracle provide the JVM for Java it would be 20 billion times better.

It's a sad state of affairs that such a powerful language requires libraries like JQuery and tools like jslint to make it work.

If you take DOMs out of the picture it's not really a language that's used though. I mean, that is 99.9% of its use. Any discussion of JS where you ignore the DOM is not really a meaningful discussion of JS.

Any discussion of JavaScript where you limit yourself to DOMs is stuck in the 90s.

 

* Flash's ActionScript is JavaScript without a DOM.
* Mozilla Rhino is a JavaScript engine for the JVM - no DOM.
* node.js which Caer mentioned is a servery thing without a DOM.
* Qt (the desktop GUI framework) uses JavaScript as a general purpose language.
* Unity (3D game engine) supports JavaScript for game programming.

 

There's plenty of others I wasn't even aware of - OpenOffice and Photoshop both allow scripting with it, and numerous other minor things all use it.

 

It's probably is still >99.9% used by browsers (even though I'm sure that's not a remotely scientific statistic :P ), but non-browser use has definitely been growing these past few years.

Flash's ActionScript is ActionScript. They are both ECMA-based but they are siblings and not parent/child.

Mozilla's Rhino is what? Never heard of it.

Server side JS is a silly idea. Not an inherently bad idea. Just... why another C-like scripting language on the server? Like there's not enough.

Qt uses fucking everything as a general purpose language. May as well say I can use JS as a scripting language in Unity. Which I can. But I can also use Python, C# or Boo.

Oh, you did say that (genuinely hadn't read that far yet).

They're still minority uses. The vast majority of JS ever written is DOM stuff. That is its primary use. Oh right, you said that too. What the fuck are you arguing with me for?

I'm not saying limit the discussion to the DOM. I'm saying acknowledge that that accounts for the massive majority of usage and that any other use is niche, at best.

(I'm not actually asking what Rhino is. I don't care. Partly because I don't care and partly because Mozilla won't be around as a browser much longer the way Chrome is growing)

(I still use FF :$ )

lol @ U Anthony Anthony Thomas.

*Anthony Joseph Thomas

 

But I don't use the Joseph since it's just a confirmation name, and my parents thought my name was badass enough not to need a middle name at birth.... Andrew James.

Andrew James Francis if we're including confirmation names :D

JavaScript is so much more than just another C-like scripting language.

It shares (more-or-less) the brace-based syntax, but JS is functional and prototype-based, neither of which C is (nor its crappy successors).

C++, C#, Java and PHP all implement stupid class-based OO (which I hope the world will eventually realise is a big turd), and everyone who has experienced first-class functions, closures, etc wishes their own language had those features.

Unity uses JavaScript as its primary language - it's what the docs are written for. (Whilst C# and Boo are two alternatives.)

Similarly, Qt might provide connectors for everything under the sun, but its default/internal scripting language is JavaScript.

People are starting to use JavaScript outside of browsers because of the realisation that it's a reasonable language and that it shouldn't be held responsible for the mess the retarded browser manufacturers made of things.

And that's why I'm arguing with you - just because 99.9% of JS involves the DOM doesn't mean that JS is tied to it. It's only a niche at the moment, but it's a growing one, and in a few more years it'll probably be as popular off the DOM as on it.


Oh and Chrome is not going to displace Firefox.

Might end up with a bigger market share, but it's certainly not going to kill it off.

WTF? "Joseph" and "James Francis"? Is that it?

Fucking Lightweights.

I got more middle names than both of you put together. :P

QtScript is based on ECMAScript primarily so is again a sibling rather than a child of javascript. Unityscript is only very very loosely based on JS. And regardless, they're still very niche uses.

As I said, I don't think JS on the server is a bad idea, just a stupid one. PHP works fine. If you don't like that then Ruby or Python work fine too. If you don't like that then Perl works fine. If you're a masochist then there's server side java. If you feel the need to pay more money to people then there's all the MS server side stuff. And there is of course coldfusion, which isn't very good.

Of course choice is good - the more the merrier. Except that in order to be useful a language needs to be installed when I buy a webserver. Or on my clients' webservers which they already tend to have which tend to be the most default setup imaginable. When server side JS is stable, secure and ubiquitous enough to be in those setups then I will begin to become interested. Until then I choose to dismiss it as the prattling of people who fetishise difference for the sake of difference.



It kinda does, yeah. Like if we're having a discussion about the uses of petrol and you want to talk only about lawnmowers and chainsaws and ignore cars.



No, it won't. It'll have a short lived ascendancy while it's trendy and then people will forget about it. Sure it will be included more often as a choice of interpreted languages in stuff like Qt - and that's a good thing. But it won't go further than that. It's not going to usurp all the other choices and become pre-eminent. If anything was going to do that it would be good old python. It's primary use will remain client-side web stuff for the foreseeable future (increasingly so with html5).

Chrome ending up with a bigger market share than FF is the very definition of killing it off. Mozilla will never die, few large open source projects ever completely die. But when it's down to under 10% share it'll be irrelevant as, frankly, it deserves to be. It was a great browser for a while but then they started making some very odd decisions and let Google in the back door. Which is a shame because I'd rather have a genuinely free/open project be on top.

Come on then Peeb, what are your middle names? Can you beat Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso?

I'm in bed now and can't be bothered responding to all that, except to say that Python has/had no chance because it confuses/scares too many people.

Firefox will always have more functionality than Chrome, because it's built by/for people who want that, whilst Chrome sacrifices functionality for simplicity and speed.
It wont become irrelevant all the while Chrome's developer tools remain shite and awkward compared to Firebug.

See now what you've done, you've set me off again. :@

I'm putting this down and going to sleep.

No.

Nor that Wolfgang guy either.

And I aint telling. :P