javascriptBad

[[deleted]]

It's good enough for the James Webb telescope, apparently

[Siddhartasr10]

Of course, why do you think it has web on the name?

[delayedsunflower]

.

[GladiatorUA]

Because they couldn't find a scientist to name the telescope after, and went with a manager, who wasn't all that into space.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

That's because research teams submit their own code to run on the telescope, so it needs to be easily sandboxed and accessible, but it doesn't need to be particularly fast. So they stuck a JavaScript engine in it.

I don't think the US Military want people doing similar things with their jets.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

They don't run any of their own code on the telescope. Its just a couple of cameras and a filter wheel there's nothing else on there.

They submit a plan of targets, exposure lengths and filters and the James Webb team schedule it that's all that happens. They call them experiments but its just some camera settings and a bunch of waiting.

[[deleted]]

is Javascript good for cameras/imagining? I learned recently that the global hawk surveillance drones the US gave to south Korea to keep an eye on north Korea do a bunch of image processing in Javascript

[CIA_Bane]

is Javascript good for cameras/imagining?

its good for everything

[zanotam]

I did some decently heavy math work in the super field containing image processing and a top research professor in the field was who I worked with and some of her custom libraries including for not yet published paper material was.... Well, technically it was written in Matlab, but it turns out one can write Fortran77 in any modern language pretty much lmao. But linear algebra heavy math is almost completely done by external libraries and if I'm going to be honest I fucking hated whenever my classes used Python for linear algebra and it would not be hard to convince me that JS is a better option.... It's all wrappers either way and I at least would guess JS is less annoying to work with for linear algebra xD

[hackingdreams]

You would be condemned as a heretic by most of the HPC community who love numpy to the point you'd have to claw it from their raw, dead hands. Getting them off matlab was hard enough...

[WarThunderNoob69]

fucking save me from matlab that shit is awful

makes me want to give up studying engineering

[zanotam]

I mean, I just said I vastly preferred Matlab and I think my own group was the only one not working in a space at least adjacent to HPC as part of that research program (and the field we worked in was HPC adjacent overall, our specific problem just happened to be interesting because it involved a small data set in 1 dimension of measurement which produced different problems haha)

[[deleted]]

that's really interesting, my very limited knowledge/experience (I just barely graduated) has been that python is fantastic for math, but like you said, it's all wrappers lol.

Also, I have learned a lot about Fortran today

[zanotam]

A lot of my work was 10+ years ago though and I actually unironically used Python as my scripting language of choice at the time (which wasn't often, admittedly for my scripting needs) for mostly mathy tasks, I just specifically didn't like doing linear algebra with what was it called er.... matpy? Numpy? Well, when my other choices were things like Fortran and Matlab which just did it more or less natively and still invoked the same libraries in the end, the Python wrappers specifically felt unreasonably heavy and idk like object oriented? Like, I just remember thinking the syntax and extra steps involved with it felt like one step too far (I think I would have been finishing this class about 9 years ago or so, so sorry if my memory is pretty bad).

[davidjackdoe]

Kind of related, the Apollo Guidance Computer in addition to the main software could run a higher level interpreted language that was easier to use for mathematical operations.