without knowing the first thing about it, i'm going to go out on a limb and say that web dev is the stuff of nightmares

Anyone here have experience with pritunl?

https://pritunl.com/

What do you mean? I'm at a mere 71 dependencies for my node app.

It's a sad case because it doesn't need to be nearly as difficult as everyone is making it out to be.

Don't worry, Angular 2 is already the new hotness and there was another framework announced that I forget but have filed under...okay (maybe by Google?!)

Now I am no JS developer so am probably wrong, but wouldn't those else legs just end up being noops and not really harm anything (aside from showing that the coder is a dumb**** that is)?

That is what suzzer is trying to show.

I don't know JS either so not exactly sure what typeof () method returns or what this code was meant to be doing in the larger picture but to me it looks like if X exists (or more specifically if X has a type that is anything other than undefined) carry on as normal.

Seems like you could pass around bad data that way.

Reading that code would instantly terrify me about what they did to solve challenges they came across.

I think Google has Angular 1, Angular 2, Web Assembly, Google Web Kit, Polymer, and I'm sure they are working on the Grand Unified Language of Chrome Browser + Chrome OS + Android by now.

Can anyone explain to us non-web people what the point of all of this is? I understand some people do want to advance the world and perhaps get some of that jQuery glory, but why would large Cos come along and add more to the mess when they clearly have the talent to make one amazing product? And why can't people in the FLOSS world just work together rather than change a few items of syntax to roll their own framework?

I guess their is a funny political snide that works here: "Don't vote, it only encourages them." Why can't people just like, not download it, not write blogs about it, not use it all, because it is a self-feeding cycle of encouragement?

Remember the parody that was written a few years back? http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/
JS land is actually living the parody.

Can you explain why the non-web world has C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Clojure, Go etc etc? Can't smart CS people just get together and make one "best" language?

The proliferation of JS frameworks is the result of a few factors:

- Progress is actually being made. Using Angular or React is just that much better than the older ways of doing things.
- Web dev is hard. Write once, run anywhere is hard.
- The lifecycles of web UIs tend to be short, which encourages the use of bleeding-edge technology.

What's the point of Clojure when you can already do everything in Java?

More seriously, Angular 1 is the most popular fully-featured SPA framework, Angular 2 is meant to be a modern replacement for Angular 1 that fully takes advantage of the intervening improvements in web standards, Google Web Kit was designed to allow you to create responsive Ajax apps using Java when pure server-side apps were the norm, Polymer exists to push the web components standard by experimenting with features that are not yet standardized or implemented in browsers and WebAssembly is just a continuation of the asm.js effort to make Javascript/Browsers an easy target for compiler backends. There's very little overlap between the use cases. I'm sure Google has millions of lines of code based on GWT - are they supposed to choose between throwing it away and never creating another framework for new applications?

+1 to all this, and i'll add the even simpler: people don't agree on what's best.

i'm sure coders for high frequency trading would balk at the idea of a garbage collector plopping himself down and cleaning up the clutter when there's BILLIONS to be made in every hundredth of a second

so, different solutions exist to solve different problems.

What is being done in JavaScript land is more like taking C++, then well let's create C+++ by abstracting away some features we think is ugly and calling something else, then well forget that one, let's create C+++(A) and call it a "functional" implementation of C++, but no, we don't like that either, let's make it look like Python with brackets and call this one C+++++++. Nope, forget it, let's try something that looks like Ruby and create Crub.

The other major difference is that the languages listed all were created over many years, not created in someone's bedroom over a weekend. They aren't just mere abstraction layers over C, JVM, LLVM, or whatever. They took incredible effort and thought, which explains their staying power.

To me, it seems like an incredible waste of talent and resources (especially for the job market). Yes, a handful do catch on a perhaps push the edges a bit further, but most of it isn't, and has become so ubiquitous that you can pitch a joke around about Flummox and find that it was already used (and reaching its twilight years).

And yes, I get that everyone doesn't agree on the "right" way to do things, but it seems highly unlikely that every single JS framework is significantly unique from each other, which is what I mean by working together instead of making minor syntactic changes on a fork and calling it new.

this conversation sort of reminds me of the old funroll-loops.org gentoo linux parody site. looks like it's not around anymore but it was pretty funny

looks like there's an archive here: http://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

serious question so please don't make fun of me: why is almost everything in web dev centered around javascript in some way? is it simply because it's such an elementary part of web dev that it's impossible to avoid, or what? all the frameworks i'm aware of (like all three or four of them i guess) are written in JS, is there just no alternative?

i have zero working knowledge of web development obviously, so if this question just doesn't make any sense i'm sorry.

The browser has to support whatever you send it. A browser doesn't have a way to run C++ for instance.

Although, on the back end (aka web servers) there are tons of language options.

C was a step up from assembly language and "close enough to the machine" that it could be used in kernel mode programming and system level programming. However, C (in my view anyway) promotes some less than desirable programming practices and can result in some very nasty bugs that are difficult to resolve. Also object oriented programming became popular and some of the pitfalls of C were addressed in C++. C++ has its own set of issues though but the basic reason C++ exists is that it is "close enough to the machine" and has advantages to using C.

Well Java was developed at Sun Microsystems as an answer to C++ in promoting portability, object oriented programming, and fixing some of he pitfalls of C++ (memory leaks with dynamic memory allocation, corrupt pointer problems, etc.). In 1985 Java was not feasible as a production level programming language. Processor technology was not advanced enough. Interpreting byte code adds a lot of processing overhead more or less. By 1995, Moores Law had worked its magic and processor technology had advanced to the point where the overhead in interpreting byte code was an acceptable trade off to the increased productivity in using Java. At that time Microsoft wanted to put their stamp on Java and to make a long story short, Sun rejected their ideas and thus C# came into being as an answer to Java in developing Windows based code.

I think it is fair to say that advancements in processor technology have made these languages viable.

Software development productivity is the underlying reason for choosing a language more or less. Processor speeds have maxed out at least for the time being. There are physical limitations that are significant barriers to increasing processor speed significantly at this point. It will be interesting to see how software technology advances in light of this. I'm seeing a lot more activity around SoC FPGAs that can be programmed for specific tasks. Intel just came out with a Xeon processor chip integrated with an FPGA that certain customers are using to develop server side software for instance.

I'm not sure the effort required for maintaining one true framework is less than the effort required to build lots of more ideological frameworks.

Web languages have to be safe to execute (i.e. not able to modify the file system or whatever, also scripting languages so the code can be checked) and very widely supported. For historical reasons that means JavaScript.

Javascript is the native scripting language of the browser (by convention). You can open a file with js code (embedded in html) in a browser and it will run without any other engine or middleware. This makes it unique, and is why its so ubiquitous in web dev.

Great summary thanks.

Good news:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/03/app...w-open-source/

[dunno if I'll ever write a single line of code in it but well lol closed programming languages]