I’ve worked with multiple teams where QA tests in prod behind feature flags, canary deploys, etc. Staging environments and QA don’t always go hand in hand.
You’re right. You can’t take advantage of it. But not for any of the reasons you listed.
You’ve already decided you would fail, and that’s all it takes to seal the deal.
Dare a little. You’ve already made a list of your weaknesses. Now make a list of your strengths. Then sell yourself on how each weakness can be explained as a strength. If there’s nothing there at the end of the exercise, you haven’t lost anything. But you may just end up with some useful clarity on your worth in the marketplace.
I was commenting on the stuffed title. Not the content. That is why I specified that I had only read the title - because the comment was about the title.
My point was your point - pretty much exactly. You just assumed malintent, which is a problem HN seems to have.
If you want a title to be meaningful, stop stuffing it with words that don't accurately describe your tech.
"Bastion - Developer-friendly actors in Rust" would be a simpler title that clearly explained exactly what the library aimed for, with the details in the readme. From that, I would be interested in exactly which guarantees the library provided.
"Highly-Available" and "Fault-Tolerant" are the two most common of the three basic dist-sys principals chosen by projects (the third being netsplit tolerance, which is very rare compared to the number of other dist-sys technologies). Therefore, they tell me little.
"Distributed" can mean a number of things by itself - concurrent programming, GPUs, etc. are all "distributable". Of course, though, it's a buzzword, and thus could mean just about anything here.
A "runtime" when applied to a language usually means a standard or official supporting library runtime. You don't call ncurses a "runtime". To me, it meant that it took the Rust standard library and somehow made it "distributed", which made very little sense.
So yes, I read only the title. And I had something to say about the title. Shoot me.
You don't know enough about the title to comment on it until you know what it's describing. All your questions would have had obvious answers if you had done so. All the terms you raised FUD about were in fact being used in perfectly appropriate ways. So no one had to assume anything about your motive to conclude that your comment had negative value.
The whole point that the first comment tried to make was that titles should be as precise, detailed, and concise as possible. Exactly for the reason so that you should not have to read the whole page to understand what the title was about.
For me I had some of the same questions and “Bastion - an actor framework for Rust” would have covered the content as well.
Take the comment as general advice on how to define titles instead of an attack and flagging it to oblivion.
This would have been less accurate and far less interesting. A title that somehow referenced the Erlang roots of the design might be an improvement, but without comparing to an existing project I don't see a better way to summarize the project's full value proposition than exactly the title we saw. But of course if you don't actually read the article you can't find that out. You're allowed to think the title is stupid and not read the article, but then don't come here and pretend your ignorance is insight. That's why the top level deserved to be flagged to oblivion, though FWIW I only would have downvoted.
Unless you're optimizing for stagnation, this really is a terrible approach to reaping the benefits of innovation. If your prereq to trying something better is that it needs to mirror something that's "decent already," you'll spend most of your life stuck on the same plateau.
History is full of technologies that are superior to existing options on one metric or another and yet failed to take over due to switching costs. Attacking someone as “optimizing for stagnation” is a really bizarre way to view their reaction to a product offering a smooth on boarding process.
Yeah, you're right. I should make the time to learn more stuff and never make excuses for why I don't.
On the other hand, I don't think you fully understand where I'm coming from. "Optimizing for stagnation", "stuck on the same plateau". Idk, I just want to run a container. I'm totally fine being on the same Docker plateau if something like Podman makes me re-learn what I already know how to do.
Unlike Git, which, from the start, was different and BETTER than SVN, can you really make the case that Podman would be BETTER if it didn't try to follow Docker conventions? If not, what are we talking about here?
How much more real world evidence does HN need to see before the "JS isn't a real language" meme is abandoned?
Pretty sure we're up to billions of real world value created by software written in Javascript. If you're still dismissive at this point, it's time to catch up. You've missed the boat.
It's a "real" language, it's just not a terribly good or fast one. It's works decently when its use is limited to what it was made for: manipulating web pages. For anything else, the "designed on the back of a used piece of toilet paper" starts to shine through.
And no, a JIT can't save you from this, it can only make things acceptable.
That it can create "real world value" is an extremely low bar, which is passed by any turing complete language. COBOL creates "real world value".
From everything I've seen, its performance sits just below Java (4x slower, perhaps) on some standard algorithms or tasks, and significantly faster than languages like Ruby, Python, etc.. I never see hate for those languages like for JS, so I'll disregard that.
>not terribly good
This one never has made sense. What is it missing that makes you hate it so? I think it has rather robust asynchronous handling, 'everything is an object' has lots of nice implications when paired with functionality like Object.keys / .assign, ... So what are the issues you see that make it 'bad'?
"4x" is a lot slower, and a lot of things are much worse than this. You have to have deep knowledge of the VM (such as knowing how "hidden classes" work in V8) to be able to get JS close to Java.
> so I'll disregard that.
You shouldn't. Claiming a JIT'ed language is fast due to being faster than Python, an entirely interpreted language, is like saying a moped is a fast vehicle because it's faster than biking. Apples and oranges.
Being faster than PyPy, the JIT'ed Python implementation, is a more interesting thing, but this is still very far off "fast" languages.
> What is it missing that makes you hate it so?
Most language features, really. "Everything is an object and objects are hashmaps, EVEN ARRAYS" (terrible for performance, type safety), "array of int16" strings with totally broken unicode codepoint handling (ES2016 brought new ways to deal with codepoints, but the standard way is still broken), the "Number" type which is totally retarted, the terrible "prototype" system, the malice that is "this" and how any bare function expression had its own this context (arrow functions are a good workaround now), and god I could go on.
"Everything is an object" is only useful if you either actually need a hashmap (then use one!), or you have sloppy types.
JS, as a langauge, is not well designed. I'm not saying it had to be Haskell or Rust, but JS is far below average.
It works, and does it job decently due to the very hard work of JS engine implementors trying to make this crazy thing fast, but that's not the same as being good.
> 4x" is a lot slower, and a lot of things are much worse than this. You have to have deep knowledge of the VM (such as knowing how "hidden classes" work in V8) to be able to get JS close to Java.
That's a solid argument for only programming in C and Assembly because they are often 4x faster than anything.
> Most language features, really.
AKA, your preferences are "language features".
> Everything is an object
So you don't like Python. Or Ruby.
> the "Number" type which is totally retarted
Very technical argument there.
> the terrible "prototype" system
So you prefer classical inheritance. Cool. Doesn't mean prototypal inheritance is a bad thing.
None of what you mentioned are missing features, they are personal preferences stemming for your own language preference that differs dramatically from Javascript. I'd start by disassociating your opinionated stances from actual weaknesses in the language, of which there are many, and none of them are what you mentioned.
Wow, now we're complaining about the outdated versions of a language? Come on man. Nobody is going to write a modern application in ES5 and there are plenty of warts in old Java, C and Python applications as well. That's the nature of them being "old".
Why does that impact whether or not it's a reasonable choice to use the language today? Old libraries I could understand, but old independent projects? How do they affect the current state of the language?
Isn't it obvious? You apply for a job, company that isn't a startup has code that is likely written with old JavaScript whose replacement is not economical, so even if you do everything new in ES7, you still have to wade through old ugly code, likely everyday.
I read it that he meant "fixes for these things are missing and that makes me hate it", i.e. I read it as the answer to your question. He doesn't hate it because it lacks features, he hates it because the existing features are badly implemented/thought-out.
If I threw billions of dollars of vested interest at Python/Ruby/COBOL/(insert language of your choice) we can probably make those run at JS speeds as well. Does that solve the fundamental drawbacks of the languages?
Nope. No it does not.
JavaScript is particularly egregious because of it's weird behaviour about types and coercion and you know, just silently failing, behaviour that I wouldn't want going on in any proper system that handles anything important. Other people have written at great length about JS's many failings.
JS is not the only language with nice async support, practically every mature language has async support and a good number of the compiled ones have proper parallel support as well.
I think this is a really important point. Every browser vendor has spent huge amounts of dollars to increase the performance of Javascript. I don't know if there's another language that has enjoyed this level of investment... Maybe Java is closest, there are multiple companies working on their own VM implementations.
The reason so much has been spent on Javascript: it runs in the web browser. For sure, people have found other reasons to like Javascript but at the bottom of the pile, money was spent because it was in the browser and the browser vendors wanted the browser to do more.
every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion, that's simply the nature of the beast.
sure wish i knew what you are talking about w/r/t "silently failing". JS has working exceptions just like 99% of widely used languages.
I'm very glad that you've been omniscient enough to determine what "proper" parallel support is, though. How's that working out for you? Meanwhile, those of us using JavaScript simply run one process per core and never worry about contention, deadlocks, or race conditions.
> every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion
Do they now?
$ irb
irb(main):001:0> "0" + 1
TypeError: no implicit conversion of Fixnum into String
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1
from /usr/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'
irb(main):002:0> ^D
$ python
>>> "0" + 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects
>>> ^D
$ node
> "0" + 1
'01'
> Meanwhile, those of us using JavaScript simply run one process per core and never worry about contention, deadlocks, or race conditions.
If you never worry about those things, then you're either not sharing any resources at all (in which case threads are also dead easy), or you're failing to deal with the shared resources properly.
I know you know this, but for the GP or anyone else: "Dynamically typed" doesn't mean "strongly typed". Python and Ruby are strongly typed, JS is weakly typed.
Thank you for illustrating my point. All of the dynamic languages made different decisions on how to handle type conflicts, there simply is no right or wrong answer.
Oh, and JavaScript is single-threaded. It's impossible to share resources in a single process.
> every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion, that's simply the nature of the beast.
No, that's not true at all. Dynamic languages don't necessarily have type coercion at all, much less weird behavior around it (and, conversely, statically typed languages they have coercion may have weird behavior around it; there's just no link between dynamic typing and weird coercion behavior.)
> Who's to say not doing type coercion isn't weird?
Well, if someone has to do it, I will: not doing type coercion isn't weird, and doing inplicit type coercion (not strict promotion[0]) is both weird and dangerous.
But, in any cases that's not really the point. The point is that in this...
> Every dynamic language treats things slightly differently.
“dynamic” is irrelevant. Languages have a wide variety of approaches, doing promotion, coercion, neither, or both (though where both are done, it's often just called coercion even when it is promotion), and dynamic vs. static is mostly irrelevant.
[0] that is, where the “from" type has a range that is a subset of the range of the “to” type.so that there is never a change in meaning resulting from the conversion.
> I'm very glad that you've been omniscient enough to determine what "proper" parallel support is, though. How's that working out for you? Meanwhile, those of us using JavaScript simply run one process per core
Yeah, and I can do the same thing in Python, and it will be equally as lame: both languages are fundamentally single-threaded.
You act as if JS has all problems solved: Erlang/Elixir/Golang have far superior async & parallel stories and will happily thrash JS/Node in performance and efficiency.
How’s it working out for me? Well I do a lot of stuff in Haskell and Rust now, so pretty great actually.
1. Type Safety. TypeScript helps, but until strong typing is mandatory in the language, I can't fathom using JS in any sizable project. This is also true of Python, et al.
2. A sane dependency management framework. Maven solved this problem a decade ago. Gradle is trying to fix Maven's XML mistake. But the fact is, if I need a dependency in Java, I know how to get it. And as a bonus, Maven Central isn't going to go down next Tuesday because Timmy in Alberta threw a temper tantrum or something.
3. A sense of stability. Javascript's framework churn is just exhausting.
2. After the npmjs.com registry became immutable and npm got lockfiles I feel npm is pretty much there as far as dependency management systems go. I'm not sure if npm shares the cache across projects (like the ~/.m2/repositories folder for maven/gradle/leiningen), but you can get that with the yarn client if saving disk space is important.
> ...until strong typing is mandatory in the language, I can't fathom using JS in any sizable project.
There are quite a large number of counter-examples to show type safety isn't especially important to the success of large projects.
I think the guarantees it provides are far too limited and weak to support large software systems. It relies on static code analysis, which doesn't mean much unless your app is a single build and runs as a single instance. That's more of a '90's style Microsoft Word type of app than what a typical large software project is today. Meanwhile the guarantees it does provide are only helpful to the extent developers can map their domain problems to the capabilities of the type system. Sometimes there is a nice natural fit, but usually the typesystem is both too weak (doesn't provide a convenient and natural way to impose the constraits of your problem domain) and too strong (imposes constraints your don't need or want, encumbering your development process).
Not to mention that when it comes to Javascript, you can opt-in to about as much static code analysis, including type-safety, as you want.
> until strong typing is mandatory in the language, I can't fathom using JS in any sizable project.
There are massive JS projects in production today, but that's moot. It's never going to be mandatory because that ruins the point. Typing isn't a requirement of a language.
> A sane dependency management framework. Maven solved this problem a decade ago.
A Rube Goldberg machine that solved a problem? Maven's goals may have solved the problem, but its implementation did not.
> A sense of stability. Javascript's framework churn is just exhausting.
What creates hostility is the sentiment of being forced to use a bad language. There are many alternatives to python or php but none really to javascript (transpilers hacks apart). Webassembly might change that.
The only other language that I have seen generating as much hostility is vb6, and also I believe because some developpers found themselves forced to use it.
Oh yeah, just wait until during a job interview somebody complains that you aren't "pythonic" enough, i.e. don't use some weird inconsistent syntactic wart somebody learned to love.
Have you ever used a language like Elixir? After using Elixir, my first thought was "why the f would anyone even use JS in 2018?" That's how poor the design choices of JavaScript are. Not to mention that the name itself is trademarked by the biggest troll (Oracle corporation).
After using something like Elixir, you'll even wish if Javascript could be permanently banned from the Software industry for ever.
I use Elixir + Ruby + Coffeescript and I still wish JS was never invented.
I used to think the same thing back when I used Clojure + ClojureScript. Hah, what idiot would choose Javascript over my god tier Clojure/Script setup?
Well, one day I actually tried to build a company and my cofounder just couldn't be fucked to learn Clojure. We decided on Node. I was forced to learn how to play nice with Javascript where I learned how to appreciate it.
Nowadays, I have a hard time justifying something like Clojure/Script over Javascript. Same with Elixir. And I am very wary of people who can't spot trade-offs since that was how I used to be, and I was wrong. I just didn't have enough experience.
There is no best. There are only trade-offs. Elixir/Clojure might be a good business decision for your project, but if you can't concede any positives to Javascript, I don't think you have a firm grip. And in the end it's always a business decision, not a technical one.
"There are only two kinds of file systems. Those that corrupt your data eventually and those nobody uses."
Luckily, filesystem designers worked hard at making their filesystems journaling, fault tolerant, and more. And we stopped complaining angrily about filesystems ruining weeks (or months) of work, because it stopped being a regular occurrence.
We still complain about the flaws of C++ because they are a constant source of pain.
Stroustrup is arguing that if something is popular criticisms against it must therefore be invalid. He's wrong.
I don't think he's saying the criticisms are invalid, but just that they are at the forefront of more people's minds because the respective language is more prevalent. Languages that are barely used also have their problems - they are just undiscovered or spoken about less.
If he wanted to make the really mundane point that people don't complain about things they don't use there would be absolutely no reason to bring C++ into it. He could just remark that nobody complains about the bad handling of the Model T anymore because nobody drives it. It's true but why is that relevant or at all interesting? Do we really believe this is the mundane observation Stroustrup is making?
No. Stroustrup uses his snarky retort to deflect criticism. When C++ is criticized by (academic) language designers, his comment reads as "and yet people use my language and not yours". And that's pretty immature.
Popular tools have to meet a high quality standard because every wart in the language affects millions of people.
Good languages are local maxima in the language design landscape. C is a good language. As is Python. And C#. There are many projects for which C or Python or C# are fine language choices.
Other languages have great ideas in them, but the languages themselves are a mixed bag. Perl, Java, C++. Perl inspired Ruby. Java inspired C#. But we haven't seen a good successor to C++ yet, probably because building a systems language is much more difficult than building an interpreted/scripting language.
COBOL was the state of the art when it was designed, but any evolution on top of that is, by necessity, limited by a 60-year-old core design. While it _has_ produced a lot of real world value in the almost 6 decades of its existence, starting a new project in COBOL would be ill-advised.
Existing projects were written in whatever language for whatever reasons, it's "Would I start a project in this language today?" that's the bar to beat in terms of language "quality" and, in that sense, COBOL is a fairly low bar for most domains.
"real world value" is a completely fair metric. You might be able to argue that different languages offer more value than JS, for different use cases. But mocking the idea of "real world value" seems to completely miss the underlying point of app development -- which is to deliver value.
Again, "delivering value" is a ridiculously low bar, when you measure "value delivered" by revenue. We ought to do better than that.
Some extra hoops to jump above "delivering value (measured in revenue)" are:
- Not creating extra problems for yourself down the line (maintenance costs, complexity, technical debt).
- Not creating extra problems for everyone else (promotion of technologies causing problems if adopted).
- Not dumping externalities on other people (inefficient solutions causing worse UX, more frustration and extra electricity usage).
- Delivering actual value, as measured on the user end (whether or not the software makes them more productive), instead of revenue end (i.e. did we manage to trick enough people to pay us?).
It's very much in the same state that VB was, or even "Excel programming" is today: it certainly works and it certainly produces a lot of business value. It's just that the downsides appear further down the road; maintainbility and scalability issues, or intrinsic conversion causing data loss. That kind of thing.
Every time someone waits for an Electron app to load, or watches it eat their ram? That gets added to the prejudice scale. Every overly-slow page load that eats mobile battery. The feeling that "it doesn't have to be this way" is very strong.
These aren't Electron apps. They are applications written in Javascript and compiled to native via ReactXP and react-native-windows.
Maintainability is a problem regardless of language, scaling is moot as these run native code, scalability is an odd word choice given we are talking about desktop apps, and intrinsic conversion can be solved via TypeScript, Flow or any other typing framework. C, Java and C# all have their own set of downsides as well, but we don't pretend those aren't "real" languages.
You are correct that "it doesn't have to be this way" which is why native compilation exists and is continuing to grow.
I don't think JavaScript itself is the problem here. Electron is slow to load and uses a lot of memory because it's loading an entire multiprocess Chromium runtime with all of the Web platform implemented, optimized for speed and security rather than memory usage.
Microsoft are using React Native here (aside from the Win32 build), which is going to be a lot more lightweight because it relies on the native platform for the heavy lifting.
Let's not confuse popularity (as in lots of users) and popularity (as in lots of love). Death and taxes are popular too! People write javascript because they have no other choice to run in the browser. I don't see that as a testimony that it is a great language.
If your only concern is the ergonomics of the language then there are lots of compile-to-JS languages. Some of them also compile to WebAssembly, which allows them to bypass the GC. It’s still not native speed, but it’s close enough for many applications.
There are pros and cons, but within the next few years it could become common to write in your language of choice, compile to WebAssembly, and ship an app that’s within roughly 50% of native speed.
I imagine JS will still be hugely popular even in that scenario, but that’s a different topic.
I will abandon my skepticism of JavaScript as soon as JavaScript boosters abandon their infomercialesque “millions of people can’t be wrong!” attitude and make a compelling case for the language itself. JavaScript is all we have for web dev which is why it’s so popular. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fundamentally flawed language, it just means that no one has been able to popularize better solutions because of network effects.
the millions are not saying it's perfect. that would be wrong. as you say what we have is js, so let's move on and make something useful with it instead of complaining about it being flawed. it is evolving, being standardized and getting new features. its not going to go away anytime soon, so instead educate yourself into avoid the pitfalls that exist in the language and have fun being productive.
Nobody is claiming you can't write real software in JS. What they're saying is that it is a waste to do so when so much better tools are available. When you're in the browser there are such huge benefits that it makes sense. Elsewhere I find it hard to understand JS mania.
It's about prevalence. The more prevalent a language is, the more the complainers come out in force. PHP is another language that has created billions of dollars of value, yet it doesn't stop the computer science purists from bashing it every other day. Just ignore the negativity and keep writing code in what makes sense to you.
JS empowers beginners and disempowers advanced developers. If you are learning programming, JS helps you, if you need sensible pro-level features, you are out of luck.
"Pretty sure we're up to billions of technical debt created by software written in Javascript."
There, I fixed that for you. I didn't miss the boat. I've had to maintain mountains of awful code written by careless programmers in a pathetic language with a morass of constantly changing libraries for run-times (web browsers) that can't even be counted on to interpret the code the same.
But, just #1 in that list - You need to use a utility library to work with data types in a normalized form? In 2018?? Let that sink in. I hadn't had to do this with any other language.
Even so, Java is now at a place where you can ship self-contained, zero-dependency applications that are comparable in size to other compiled languages (and superior to web-hybrid options like Electron).
For cross-platform desktop GUI apps, I would argue that JavaFX combined with Java 9 modularization is hands-down the best choice available today.
Electron is succeeding in the desktop GUI space because it tears down the barriers to desktop app development. While the author's article is excellent, when it comes to Electron, he (like most engineers) is still missing the point: the choice between Electron and its alternatives doesn't pivot on file size.
Well, will see how Electron will pan out in the end. While I dislike default Java Swing GUI (it can be made easily to look native but many devs previously did not do it), JavaFX can be made to look like anything with almost weblike feel to development and animations.
Now, more than the looks I dislike the slowness and utterly unacceptable memory Electron apps consume. I ditched Electron and VSCode (it is a little better than Atom) because I don`t want to have my text editor eat 500mb ram to open 1 medium file and crash on large ones. Same for Slack and other Electron apps. And it is not even funny to see dev console when some Atom plugin or whatever crash. I`m interested how many devs also ditched this two editors ONLY because of Electron bloat.
I'm using JetBrains IDEs now instead. They're definitely not lightweight, but it's built in functionality is generally a lot more stable than what I get with text editors + a lot of plugins.
My cursor lagging is not a small concern. It disrupts the flow between code being re/written and the mental model I'm trying to pour out.
Text input lag is an issue every editor has to deal with, and many go to extreme lengths to optimise it. Electron makes it far more difficult than most editors to fix, and every lag issue opened on VS Code seems to get decent attention, (and patches), and comparisons to Sublime Text.
Seems to be something I'm not alone in caring about.
I've honestly seen only one properly written Electron app and it's VSCode. Everything else electron sucks. VSCode is not great either but it's much better than say, Atom or Slack.
Sure, but Discord's web app and their native app are basically equivalent. The native app gives a little more system integration (like global hotkeys and direct access to sound hardware) but fundamentally the Discord app is just a webview.
I don't think anyone doubts that a high-quality website wrapped in a webview won't be at least the same quality. The question is whether "web-native" platforms can do more than just be a branded browser.
I was curious as I've never found a standalone visual git client I liked as much as IntelliJ's integrated one. So I downloaded it, found it was 1/4 of a GB and wouldn't look at a local repo without logging in to a web service. Deleted.
I still haven't found anything better than IntelliJ's triple column view for resolving merge conflicts. Is there anything similar in a more lightweight editor?
Some years ago I was evaluating GUI git clients (the landscape has changed since) for rather simple flows and found SmartGitHg simple enough to setup and explain in under an hour and powerful enough not to drop to a shell. No affiliation here.
Another anecdote; your comment is the only one I've ever noticed that appears to be defending Slack. From an outsider looking in, I'm not sure why it is so popular.
It's popular because technical superiority isn't why people use software.
For example, Spotify eats 100% CPU if I leave it open for 24 hours yet I don't think I've met someone in the last year that doesn't have Spotify running on their computer.
Sure, but more companies have the story of needing a web app anyway which requires a specific tech stack. So you can either maintain two tech stacks or you can port your webapp to native.
Having a beautiful, easy to develop, and easy to maintain native stack means nothing when you don't have an answer to, "How do we then reuse our code in a browser?".
Electron sits in the same hybrid space as Cordova/Phonegap, and will suffer the same fate once React Native, or something similar, starts eating its lunch.
There are some ReactNative alternatives calling themselves "native" that are only "native looking css in a webview". The future will probably only get more ambiguous.
It’s really not clear what the electron app even provides over the same app in chrome. Its own icon, sure, but the behavior is just as bad as on the web—just take slack for example.
It offers access to file system and system resources as well as multi platform build support. Developers like all people will whine over anything. For students and indie devs who have little time, support, and resources things like electron are great
Right, but does eg slack actually use any of that? It’s not a great native client by any stretch—it doesn’t use a native UI, it’s not particularly snappy, and it doesn’t do any special integration. So, it seems that electron is mostly a way to distinguish certain sites from others, not that they provide a better experience.
Granted I do like the distinct app icon. But electron should mean more than that to qualify as meaningfully native.
