The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
86 points by subset 3 hours ago | 41 comments
DavidPiper 2 hours ago
I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.
replyoakinnagbe 2 hours ago
Every few years, we invent a better JavaScript. Then we transpile it to JavaScript.
replyjerf 49 minutes ago
It's all assembly code in the end. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with compiling down to Javascript, a high-level language can still implement many things that direct Javascript does not. Just about every language guarantee you've ever used can be violated by raw assembler.
replySurac 2 hours ago
My first contact with js was trying to make a button change its color on mouseover. There was no css back then. I bought a book and was so put off from the syntax that i never looked back to js from that day on. Never regretted my decision
replynotesinthefield 2 hours ago
I had a similar path and never came back to JS until work forced me to learn. To me, it has only gotten more readable.
replyafavour 18 minutes ago
There are a ton of reasons to object to JS but the syntax? It isn’t even all that unique.
replycomrade1234 2 hours ago
I kind of like real JavaScript with prototype inheritance. It's not how we use it in browsers though.
replyAnd now with typescript and running it in the server... I'd rather just use Java.
RIshabh235 2 hours ago
We’re past the halfway point of Bernhardt’s 2035 timeline; JavaScript hasn’t died yet, but it’s clearly writing its own eulogy in WebAssembly.
replywiseowise 53 minutes ago
Multiple generations of your family will be long dead before last JS instruction gets executed. Unless there's going to happen a global thermonuclear war. I still bet on JS surviving over most humans.
replyjazz9k 2 hours ago
I review many sites/month from different clients. They are all using some form of JavaScript.
replyIt's like PHP, it will never die.
jerf 47 minutes ago
"Death" is hard to define for a programming language. It's tempting to say "the last time anyone writes it", or maybe "runs it", but to put that in biological terms that seems like defining "death" for a person as "the last chemical bond that was part of their body is broken"... sure, it'll happen someday, but all the properties we associate with the term "death" happen rather soon than that.
replymatt_kantor 2 hours ago
> It's like PHP, it will never die.
replyI predict that PHP will live a long life, but not as long as C, and I predict JavaScript will have a lifespan closer to C's than PHP's.
varun_ch 2 hours ago
It’s also relevant that LLMs have so much JavaScript training data that I don’t see a world where we’re not still using JavaScript.
replyfishfasell 2 hours ago
The JS death and AI bubble are two events I keep hearing about but will never come.
replyarkadiytehgraet 43 minutes ago
Regardless of the content, this is one of my most favourite talks ever, especially in the delivery aspect. It served me as an inspiration for quite some time when I had to present anything to a wide audience.
reply
The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.
Not sure what timeline you’re living in, but people absolutely still write tons of JS, and WebAssembly has yet to take over as a commonly used runtime for web applications. You can definitely find examples of companies building on it, but don’t mistake that for the kind of sea change Gary was describing here.
The benefit of JavaScript is, that, after Google really pushed it to its limit with V8 and of course NodeJS made it a backend dream, that it is ubiquitous and once written usable everywhere, much kinda like PDF.
Its versatility gave it the advantage over WebAssembly to this day, because it is not as widespread available as JavaScript.
I agree with you, that JavaScript itself is nowadays tantamount with TypeScript - what a giant leap this has been. Angular (2) was the unsung hero here. Angular was harshly criticized when they went TypeScript right from the beginning while still offering a native JavaScript version as well (which was basically unusable to be honest).
It is funny, that the last hideout not featuring TS as their default option is React, while more and more major integral projects like NextJS rely out of the box on TS. ReactJS will fall, too. It wouldn't be the first time regarding innovations coming from other projects. Again Angular is leading the innovation while ReactJS is a follower.
You rarely can go wrong with JavaScript and Python, I would say.
This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another, and a human-readable to human-readable translation is still a compiler ("transpiler" is more slang than actual formal terminology).
This might just be one of those already lost battles, but like "crypto" being used to mean "digital money" rather than "cryptography", I feel like the new terminology is weird and unnecessary, so it's something I have trouble adapting to even though I rationally know that usage evolves over time and sometimes the words I like less will become the norm.
I also agree with your opinion on Angular.
But I like React, so I'm a little sad. Still, I mostly agree with you.
The reasons you criticize React are exactly the reasons I love React. Because it changes slowly, even someone like me can keep up. (Just kidding.)
Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo.
That said, idk how the performance compares to Electron or Native apps.
As a small team, optimizing for "actually getting the thing shipped" is so much better than optimizing for speed anyway.
Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.
I'm not sure if the web render engine has gotten better since then, and am too lazy to look up the links rn, but threads should be easy to find using HN search.
Still seems like a common source language + GUI toolkit that targets the web platform and various native platforms (mainly Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and desktop Linux of course) without significant overhead has not been achieved yet. And it's questionable whether it's possible, given the special requirements (and capabilities) of the web platform and the different native platform.
Hopefully the desktop story is going improve as Canonical is now leading the Flutter desktop side.
https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2026/05/20/saying-goodbye-to-a...
iirc, v8 never had any special compilation path for it to begin with.
I am hesitant to call that "support". If even Meta can't get their Electron application to work reliably, who can? WhatsApp client for macOS is awful and it's getting worse. Discord is awful and it's getting worse. Spotify works better when running through the browser. At this point, when I see that the application is using Electron, I am assuming it's not supported on my OS and I move on.
Websites have actually long been a great cross-platform mechanism
Just a shame about the giant browser you have to load first
But even document rendering with light scripting is not trivial so yeah, the required browser is the bottleneck.
I always wonder (layman question): couldn't native Electron apps (and similar technologies) save a great deal of RAM by using the same sandboxing model for apps that browsers use for tabs, instead of fully-fledged instances?
Was that an idea that Tauri also tries to implement, or am I remembering this wrongly?