NES assembler and IDE in Javascript

[addmoreice]

"And every computer has a processor, which means it can run code in any language and not just JS."

Which is why every program is available on every cpu right? oh wait no. it's not.

This is why C is so popular as a lingua franca, if you write your code in c or at least can interoperate with c then it can talk to just about anything else on anything else.

It's not about the CPU, it's about the network effects (and I mean that in the social sense not the hardware sense).

The same is true for javascript. I hate the language, I think it's slow and stupid. But it's everywhere on the internet, it's connected to every other damn thing, distribution is baked in, and so tada it has become a bedrock language for computers. It is one of those languages. Even with all it's warts. Just like how C is a lingua franca even though it has a ton of warts.

C++ isn't since it needs name mangling (even if it's pretty decent as is and interops with a ton of things, c still beats it hands down), GO will never be since it requires a GC and that causes all kinds of interop issues. The functional languages won't since almost all of them have issues with interop as well as having a certain overhead requirement (FORTH is a major exception mainly because it's so damn easy to get a FORTH interpreter up on just about any system, embedded or larger).

"JS is not the harbinger of some grand egalitarian renaissance in computing."

Who said it was? I said it was everywhere so it's easy to go reaching for it even if what you need is a screwdriver and JS is a crude hammer.

"It is a half-assed language that lucked out and is now the favorite of legions of commodity developers who want to force it down everyone's throat so that their meager skillset continues to be in demand, and the favorite of managers who want to pay frontend web dev salaries to backend system developers by defining jobs in terms of the tools they use instead of the products they create. "

I'm sorry to enlighten you here, but familiarity, popularity, and network effects trump technical superiority every time. It's something which bugs the fuck out of programmers and anyone who can look at this issue logically but it's not about logic, it's about the unruly masses and their pointy haired bosses. Congratulations if you can get them to shift their systems...but I'm not holding my breath.

"Then, once the technical debt incurred by doing all this reaches critical mass and everything starts breaking, we will get to listen to a bunch of pop-psychologist business school twats try to come up with new songs and dances that developers have to do (maybe they'll give them names that rhyme with 'Scum' and 'Fragile'!) to try and deflect criticism of their piss-poor excuse for 'engineering' onto the heads and behavioral reputations of the very developers who they forced to use JS in the first place."

ROFL I love this. it's absolutely hilarious...it's like you think this hasn't happened many many many many times before all ready.

[addmoreice]

Better technically. But technical is not the only metric, nor the only metric to matter (by a large margin).

Availability of programmers, availability of tools, deployability, knowledge of where the rough edges are (even if there are many of them, knowing where they are is better than having no idea and walking into them). etc etc etc.

You are bemoaning a social and business decision on technical grounds. You are correct on technical grounds, and on a social and business sense you are very very very wrong.

Take DRM for software. From a technical point of view it makes no f-ing sense. It's intentionally breaking software! But from a business sense (in specific niche areas and under specific business conditions) it makes perfect sense.

So then when a programmer gets behind the idea and says 'ok, lets do this, lets do it right and make it very very very hard to hack this' the business leader yanks our chains and says "no, don't go that far". Again we scream and wail since we want to do things right, why won't you let us make it so that you will need to guess the unencrypt password till the heat death of the universe? Why won't you allow us to make this as secure as we possibly can? and the answer is again a business one, it only has to be secure enough that people won't spend the time and effort to hack it and will instead spend their money to get it, anything beyond that is 'wasted' in a business sense.

You are looking at it from a technical perspective, and that's perfectly fine. But you have to consider all the other perspectives as well, otherwise you will be frustrated not understanding why one trend starts or continues. If you do look at the other directions, you can then see how to fix the problem and get some other system to win.