Javascript Applications, pt 1

Updated: Continued in Part 2.

Languages (and language studies) are an interesting phenomenon. As we know from anthropology (and middle school social studies), Eskimoes have 20 different words for various kinds of "snow", whereas we have just the one: "snow".

Now, it turns out this is just one more in a long line of urban myths that we've repeated into "truthiness" - and that's also interesting (but a whole 'nother discussion).

We look at language as deeply revealing reflections of underlying culture and structure. And while I don't deny the power that language has and the values that it can imply, I don't believe that it fundamentally enables new capabilities for a society. Is there a language that lacks poetry? Or laws? Or stories? Or religion? And I'm not sure a particular language, in and of itself, has any particular evolutionary advantage - though clearly a particular language's economy of communication is likely a reflection of a culture's evolutionary challenges.

For computer languages, this seems even more apparent. I mean, its pretty much the same CPU underneath, so the language is just a question of vanity and preference, no? It really doesn't matter what language you use, so long as you use it well?

Turns out, not so much.

Although I think there is a fundamental provability to the notion that good programming is language invariant, the grammar and semantics of a particular language can be measured along a number of axes:

• Learnability, including Self consistency, Design patterns and Portability
• Scalability, including Programming-in-the-Large, Performance, and Modularity
• Maintainability, including Debugging, Code Coverage, Traceability, and Extensability

My point here is that language features are not about CAPABILITY: you can (literally) do MORE in Assembly than any other language (although, you know what they say: you can't spell "Assembly" without "Ass"). But languages developed - some evolved, some were designed (intelligently and otherwise) - because there was a need to enable significantly greater complexity and abstraction on top of vastly increasing linear computing power.

Bottom Line? The abstractions various languages provide ultimately matter because they enable significant flexibility, at the cost of some performance. Its all just a question of the value of the tradeoffs.

Pretty long way to go to say that I think while Javascript is great, it also sucks.

I'll explore what features have been valuable and where we've suffered using it to build desktop applications in my next posts on this topic - along with some specific recommendations (for developers USING Javascript, as well as suggestions for the language itself).

As I've mentioned before, I think we're among the bold few attempting to use Javascript for Programming in the Large for desktop applications, at scale. Though AJAX is all the rage (*cough* DHTML), the discussions tend to center around "Bitless applications" - stuff in the browser.

A lot of the problems are essentially of the same type (but exaggerated for desktop apps), so I think most of the discussion applies to both, but, obviously, there are some interesting differences as well.