Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Sat Mar 10 12:27:46 PST 2012


On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 02:41:53PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> You know what I think it is (without actually looking at the code): I
> think they tried to do some highly misguided and even more poorly
> implemented hack (which they no-doubt thought was clever) for dealing
> with *cough* "old" *cough* browsers by inserting a meta redirect to a
> hardcoded URL, and then used JS to disable the meta redirect. If
> that's the case, I don't know how the fuck they managed to convince
> themselves that make one drop of sense.
> 
> When I used one of my web developer plugins to disable meta redirects,
> the screwy behavior stopped. And like you, I have JS off by default
> (WTF do you need JS for on a goddamn *ARTICLE*?). So that's probably
> what the numbnuts over at Dr Dobbs did.
[...]

I've always believed that Javascript is the hellspawn of evil incarnate.

Last year when at my day job a large-scale Javascript project was dumped
on my lap, I spent 1/2 a week's time to update myself on the language
(as well as understand that morass of lasagna code I had to work with),
and I discovered that Javascript has some really neat features, like
closures (that's why I find D's delegates so immensely useful), and that
overall, it's a not-bad language for doing neat stuff in. Especially if
you use jQuery, which almost feels like it belongs in the Javascript
spec.

I still believe that Javascript is the hellspawn of evil incarnate.

The web was originally a pull medium: you want to lookup a resource, you
send a request, the server returns a document. Nowhere in this picture
is interactivity. Oh, did they tried to make it more interactive.
Cookies, sessions, and what not, it's all an effort to make a stateless
HTTP protocol "feel" like it's interactive. The marketroids loved push
media.  They wanted more 'push' on the web. Then somebody came up with
the idea of running script snippets on the browser instead of the
server. So Javascript was born.

I've always believed that Javascript is the hellspawn of evil incarnate.

Having arbitrary Turing-complete code run on your browser just because
you asked the server "please send me resource X" is, shall we say, a
security concern? So they came up with the whole XSS thing to try to
contain the beast, along with various other kludges to try to patch
various problems that came up, and then patch the problems that the
patches introduced, ad nauseum.

But Javascript is still the hellspawn of evil incarnate.

Git-pull a couple o' years, and here we are today with a web that's
increasingly interactive, and Javascript is an essential part of it.
Whether or not that's a good thing, public opinion is generally
positive. Heck, I myself wrote an application in Javascript, actually
*two*, just because tools have developed to make it so *easy*.

I still believe that Javascript is the hellspawn of evil incarnate.

In fact, it's so easy that everybody and his neighbor's dog writes
Javascript on their website. Even if the website is essentially nothing
but a bunch of articles. Resources that you look up by sending a request
to a server and getting a document in return. Like the good ole days
when the web was a pull medium. Except now almost everything comes with
Javascript, even when it's not needed. And because it's so pervasive,
it's only a matter of time before somebody gets this bright idea that
whoever browses the web *without* Javascript must be certainly be using
an ancient dilapidated browser from before the dinosaurs walked the
earth.

So you see, Javascript is the hellspawn of evil incarnate. :-)


T

-- 
If creativity is stifled by rigid discipline, then it is not true creativity.


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