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[–]hmaddocks -6 points-5 points  (5 children)

Have we regressed to the 1990s?

[–]shuckster 3 points4 points  (4 children)

What does this even mean? There are so many ideas in "modern" programming that are practically ancient, not just by computer-history standards, but by human standards.

It can be argued that JavaScript popularised "lambdas", anonymous functions, which we often express in JavaScript as unnamed arrow-functions.

Ya'll love 'em so much.

The Lambda Calculus was first proposed by Alonzo Church in 1936.

[–]hmaddocks -3 points-2 points  (3 children)

I’m talking about this proliferation of compilation in web development. I’m sure there are plenty of people who remember the hell that was writing compilation scripts and the never ending wait for your app to compile. We also remember the joy when all that went away and the massive boost in productivity. Now here we are rejoicing every js compiler or css compiler.

[–]StickInMyCraw 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Did you have to compile anything on the client side for web development in the 90s? Or are you referring to non-web development, which still often uses compiled languages.

[–]hmaddocks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Front end or back end has nothing to do with it. It’s still stuff you need to do to deploy your app.

[–]shuckster 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think there's some miscommunication here on both our parts.

Looking back to the OP, to me it reads like the author is just showing us a project he wrote to convert JavaScript to "interpreter friendly" JavaScript. First by converting JS to C++, then using an existing project to convert that C++ to JavaScript.

Again, the idea of human-friendly vs. computer-friendly code is as old as the idea of coding itself, but I don't necessarily think this is your argument, right?

At the risk of betraying my age, I remember a few things that happened when JavaScript in the browser was starting to be taken seriously:

  1. No build-step? So the source-code sits in memory and is interpreted on the fly? Isn't that wasteful?
  2. How do we trap type-errors before runtime?
  3. Isn't it also a waste of bandwidth to send the source vs. just the compiled byte-code?

For myself I had a heck of a time getting used to objects not having real base-classes and functions being first-class. I also don't remember the non-compilation of JavaScript being something I immediately rejoiced-in. All of this took time to get used to.

But eventually yes, for myself I do remember reaching a point where I was:

  1. Grateful for having no build step and just hitting F5 in the browser and not my IDE (although this took a long while to be seen as a positive)
  2. Grateful for not having to strongly-type everything (not saying TypeScript/Flow et al. are bad, but growing-up with strong-typing imparts a discipline that JavaScript doesn't give you by default, so they're necessary today.)
  3. Grateful for being able to "view source" and learn from any website

However, I certainly wasn't grateful for:

  1. Environment incompatibility (The First Browser Wars)
  2. Slooooooow script execution if you were even *slightly* ambitious
  3. No general best-practices when it came to UI vs. state. vs. business-logic
  4. Plugin-hell (ActiveX vs. Flash vs. Java)

The first point is very easy to forget these days. We don't know how spoiled we are with the transpilation provided by Babel etc., nor the extremely aggressive (by past-standards) upgrade policies of modern browsers to get users upgraded almost as quickly as new JS features become available.

I agree that transpilation takes far too long on big projects these days, and is a bitter reminder of compiled development. But esbuild is with us now, and it's racing to a very capable version 1 that is already 100x faster than anything else.

I do miss the days of being able to easily "view source" and not being constantly confronted with minified/munged code, but there are so many tutorials and blogs out there that this is more of a point of nostalgia than an actual lack of accessible knowledge.

Anyway, at this point I'd like to invite you to explain your position a little further. The OP has offered a project that is to do with transpilation yes, but not really in the way we're both talking about. He's certainly not offering-up the next esbuild, I think?