GNOME To Use JavaScript For New User Programs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME To Use JavaScript For New User Programs

At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest last week in Brussels, GNOME developers decided to recommend JavaScript as the new language for writing GNOME applications...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI5MjU

[hubick]

Meh, I'm just gonna target generic universal HTML5 instead, maybe with some help from JQuery UI.

[Cthulhux]

[ ] you know the difference

[johnc]

Now this article gave me quite the laugh.

[petko10]

Sad story . They are pretty much keeping the crash and burn course .

[F i L]

developers like the language

I'm sure many due, but I write in Javascript every day, and I can honestly say it's one of the worse, most bug-prone languages i've ever used. Granted, the version Gnome desktop is running supports better features than what you can get away with in today's browsers. Still, prototype-inheritance + dynamic objects = developer hell for large applications. They should be pushing Vala instead, or hell, use Google's Dart with Dart VM if they really want to keep around weak-typing.. at least that has sane security, decent performance, and OOP design.

IMO, Gnome should rewrite all the Javascript code they have controlling Gnome into Vala code (like Elementary did [i believe]). The only argument for Javascript here is that it's "good for extensions".. which isn't really the case, seeing as how almost every extension breaks from one version of Shell to the next. I like Gnome, but Elementary's developers seem a bit more sane (no offense).

[j2723]

Javascript? Why exactly Javascript?
In my opinion it's a horrid language...

Why not Python instead ?

By chance, do they mean HTML+Javascript with "GNOME appliations", or actually Javascript as a stand-alone "program"?

Related:
wat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0

[smitty3268]

Javascript has it's uses

It's good for a scripting language that you can code a UI with.

I hope GNOME isn't recommending it's use for full scale apps, though, because javascript does not scale very well. It's going to be a nightmare if you start creating large codebases with it.

[cardboard]

KDE is heading in this direction too. How does it compare with QML?

[Delgarde]

By chance, do they mean HTML+Javascript with "GNOME appliations", or actually Javascript as a stand-alone "program"?

The latter. Remember, this isn't anything new, this just represents a decision to promote it as the language of choice for people wanting to code stuff on Gnome and who don't want to use C. The actual platform has been there for quite a few years - there were JS-based games in the later releases of the Gnome 2 series...