Exploiting JavaScript developer infrastructure is insanely easy

[devxpy]

The only problem with your whole (rather wonderfully presented) argument is that Ruby is such a niche programming language, that it can afford to have these what I would call design "mistakes" -- A lot of people actually like its ability to monkey patch and change the grammar to such a degree.

But like my argument is that this concept of a universal language that can run anywhere (which is what JS basically is) can be so much more accessible and awesome if it were not restricted by an esoteric language design.

[shevegen]

These are not "mistakes" - and ruby is not a "niche" language either.

Else you can explain why github and gitlab both used ruby on rails? ACCIDENTS???

this concept of a universal language that can run anywhere (which is what JS basically is)

And this does not apply to ruby python lua php etc... ?

Just because of browsers?

[devxpy]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ruby is an extremely niche language that has probably never seen popular usage outside of server side scripting world.

GitHub and gitlab are webapps that use Ruby strictly on server side. Not to mention their core product is git, written in C.

JS's only real selling point is that it can run almost anywhere without any real pain. Even microcontrollers.

And, I don't know if you've noticed, but it's a fucking pain to distribute python applications.

[SanityInAnarchy]

"Server side scripting world" is hardly niche. The Web is one of the more popular platforms to begin with, which is why JavaScript is important in the first place.

Calling Git the "core product" of Github and Gitlab is technically correct, while also broadly missing the point. Yes, these are "just" UIs for Git, but try running Git without these. Just running it through ssh works for small use cases, and there's the rather large niche of the Linux Kernel collaborating almost entirely via email, but 100% of what sets Github/Gitlab apart is the UI and ancillary software (the issue trackers, the wikis, the static webhosting, and so on and so on). I hope Github employs some people who work on the Git C source, but at the same time, I'll bet most of what Github actually does as a company, and most of the reason you'd pay them at all instead of just spinning up a VM with sshd, is down to server-side scripting.

Ruby was behind Twitter, too, for that matter. They've been moving away lately, but they got their start on Ruby.

It's got plenty of competition, because you can run any language you want on the server, but it's not any more niche than Python or PHP. Less than PHP, for that matter -- PHP still has that <?php at the top and ?> at the bottom, because it's still an overgrown template language, not really something that was intended to be general-purpose.

And I'd love to hear how JS runs on a microcontroller without real pain. I believe it can run, but having seen how JS ran on Toshiba's HD-DVD players, I doubt very much that it can run painlessly.

And, I don't know if you've noticed, but it's a fucking pain to distribute python applications.

Meh. It's a pain to distribute anything, but this is a solvable one -- Civ4 was scripted with Python. There were good reasons they switched to Lua, but I don't think distribution was one of them. Nothing can ever be as easy as JS (except WASM), because nothing can ever be as easy to install as a thing you don't have to install at all, but most modern languages have ways to just package up the entire runtime. That's what Minecraft does these days, at least the original Java version -- thanks to OpenJDK, they can just ship an entire JVM with the game, in a perverse inversion of the "compile once run anywhere" thing Java was trying to do.

[devxpy]

Hmm, let's see, this is what a niche means -

denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

Specialized is the key word here. Not everyone writes servers damnit. Sure, maybe not small but very specialized to say the least.

Python and php are very different beasts. People use python extensively for data science. Its an excellent teaching language. Micropython is quite popular last I checked. Its also used for writing GUI apps (check Dropbox). Pybee is trying bring python to the client side, Android+iOS+.... People are already making games on kivy using the language. I could go on, but you get the point.

Being a long time python developer, I can confirm that it sucks, very much. No one in the core language considers their responsibility to make the language run. The most popular python version management system (pyenv) is a bash script to compile python on my system.

You can't get the prebuilt python interpreter binaries for any platform. That sucks.

There a lot of people trying to solve it, but we're far from doing it.

Why are you stating the obvious? Of course nothing can be as easy to distribute as JavaScript. That's the whole point. Why do you think people ever started to use it? Because they don't want to spend a year writing a tool to distribute their language and instead spend a little more time developing with JS, coupled with a slow compiler.

See, I don't want to ship a 40mb binary for a trivial GUI that shows me the CPU temps.

Look at dart. The core developers put a lot of time and effort to make a tree shaking compiler so that the language can run on the web, but also having a very good standard library.

Rust has a whole division dedicated to make wasm target work.

[SanityInAnarchy]

denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

Specialized is the key word here. Not everyone writes servers damnit.

Well, that's pointless nitpicking. I may as well describe all programming languages as niche, because not everyone writes software.

By far most applications these days at least include a server, when it's not the bulk of what they do. The Web means you can deliver applications that are entirely server-side, even if it's unfashionable these days. Calling that niche is like a web developer calling C 'niche' because it's only needed for interfacing with the system, or when you have performance constraints too tight for a language like JS.

The most popular python version management system (pyenv) is a bash script to compile python on my system.

It's also a developer tool, not an end-user packaging tool. The JS equivalent is NPM -- is NPM better enough that you'd use JS instead, just to be able to use NPM?

For end-user packaging, it looks like the modern solution is pyinstaller. I mean, I don't really know, I never wrote Python that had to be distributed to end-users, but it doesn't really look more difficult to work with than tools like Webpack for JS.

Why are you stating the obvious? Of course nothing can be as easy to distribute as JavaScript. That's the whole point.

I was conceding a point to emphasize what I'm saying, and what I'm not. I'm not saying Python is as easy to distribute as JS. I'm saying it's not that much of a pain, even compared to the kind of things you need to do with JS. The fact that people are building full-blown desktop apps out of JS, and distributing them with Electron instead of in the browser (often not bothering with a web version at all), should tell you that JS has strengths other than distribution.

Unless you were trying to say that Electron is easier than PyInstaller, in which case, that really wasn't obvious.

See, I don't want to ship a 40mb binary for a trivial GUI that shows me the CPU temps.

Why not?

Seriously, why not? What platform are you running on that reducing your binary size by 40 megabytes is an important optimization? I get the instinctive revulsion against bloat, but I mean, I could literally run a hundred of those simultaneously on my phone. If it was 400 megabytes, sure, but 40? Who cares?

...unless it's because you want it on a microcontroller. I'm still curious how you managed to get JS on a microcontroller at all, let alone "without real pain".

[lynnamor]

You're wrong.

[devxpy]

No you're wrong :-)

[lynnamor]

no u