Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 4th Feb 2013 18:41 UTC
"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.
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Member since:2005-09-27
RE[3]: That's terrible
by lucas_maximus on Tue 5th Feb 2013 00:18
in reply to "RE[2]: That's terrible"
Member since:2009-08-18
It not poorly defined. JavaScript is a proper programming language with a proper language specification.
JavaScript is simply dynamically typed.
There are some oddities that come up thanks to the JavaScript Semi-colon insertion mechanism and the function scope (i.e. Hoisting).
There are some evil things that the programming language allows you to do (some of the more evil things can be effectively disabled with "Use Strict").
JavaScript has a pretty strong community and if you really get your head around it you can do some very neat things that you can't do in other languages easily.
As another has said the newer specifications are pretty good.
As for the viability of things like node.js, Trello and other quite robust web apps that were developed in reckon time pretty much disproves the notion that it is rubbish.
Edited 2013-02-05 00:35 UTC
Member since:2007-09-22
It not poorly defined. JavaScript is a proper programming language with a proper language specification.
Well, it depends how you look at it.
It was created in 10 days and the specification came much later.
Actually, having Javascript being defined in a specification didn't really improve the language.
It made it worse: http://www.livestream.com/etsy/video?clipId=pla_1463e546-47ed-4a93-...
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Yes, I do wish they would. Because JavaScript is such a poorly defined language engines like V8 have to use heuristics on it over time. JavaScript didn't suddenly become a world beating language environment because of V8. Those who do code shit like node.js.