from Hacker News

Google's proposal to split the JavaScript standard

by ksbrooksjr on 10/16/24, 10:24 PM with 2 comments

• by CharlieDigital on 10/16/24, 10:47 PM

  No comment on the proposal, but this:

      > JavaScript might finally be accessible to newcomers and fun once more!
  

  I don't think JavaScript has become less accessible. One can still write Vanilla JS without bundlers and compilers. It's still the same JS as it always was. Small HTML+JS projects I wrote in the early 2000's still work today. I think the ecosystem today is even richer and better than it was "back in the day".

  In the last few years, I've also worked with many folks that transitioned into dev from non-CS, non-engineering backgrounds with React and JS being their entry point (you may argue that React != JS).

  But a realization I'm having recently is that one day in the not so distant future, we'll think of JS like we think of assembly: just a low level target that some higher level instruction compiles to. That higher level instruction is natural language and the compiler is LLMs.

• by jauntywundrkind on 10/16/24, 10:46 PM

  Not really a Google proposal, and that just makes me way more terrified this bullshit load of crap might happen!

  > Shu-yu Guo, Google Matthew Gaudet, Yulia Startsev, Mozilla Keith Miller, Michael Saboff. Apple Peter Hoddie, Moddable Ross Kirsling, Sony

  Gods fucking forbid, holy hell. There are a lot of people who have tried and worked to de-tool JavaScript, to return it to a usable natural language directly authored and used on the web.

  We are so close, with such heavy optimization to h3 and cross-request header and body compression. We are finally near being able to just use js.

  And once again the industrial monsters come by and propose making the easy & natural flatly impossible, making what developers k ow inaccessible & insufficient for the machines & web.

  Disgusting. And the arguments suck. Suck egg. No, performance won't be better if we transpile. No, security won't be better if transpilers do the job instead of the runtime. Assuming there are transpilers in the way destroys the possibility that the runtime can get faster with new features, if they are transpiled out! Putting transpilers in the way expands the scope of security concerns & checking!

  I dislike this so so much.