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by alexkavon 3801 days ago
Agreed. I think JS is quite a broken language that should probably be replaced. It won't be, but it probably should. I know Google thinks Dart could be that language but they're not even trying to put the VM into Chrome, so it's just another replacement that needs to be compiled.

I was complaining about some JS stuff (particularly the required writing of "use strict") in the #nodejs freenode irc chat the other day and someone asked me a way to help solve these issues without breaking 50 year old code. Thinking about it, I think a good attempt would be to create an HTML meta tag that would tell the browser to parse all JS in strict mode. Maybe there's something already out there. This is already possible in nodejs, but browser side I think it could be a big help in moving things forward.
3 comments
Periodic 3801 days ago
Isn't that basically what we did with doctypes? HTML has a lot of similar issues and it has slowly managed to move forward. The real benefit was not having to mix old and new code and getting rid of all the quirks by requiring you specify that you want them if you want that old doc to work.

JavaScript could get to the same place just be letting you specify a different language in the script tag.

The big question is how we support legacy browsers for a time because many won't support the new keywords.

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alexkavon 3801 days ago
A script type could work too. Either way, there would be some indicator of how the JS VM could parse the code. It's true you could get other languages into HTML this way as well, but the trick is that the browser needs to support the VM, which can be done natively or through a browser plugin/extension. Google tried this for a Dart VM (sidenote: there is no TypeScript VM from Microsoft that I'm aware of) into Chrome but discussions led away from that idea, and now Dart compiles to JS instead. A <meta> tag in <head> would eliminate <script type="application/sjavascript"></script>, <script type="application/sjavascript"></script>, etc. Though providing an either/or situation would be optimal too to allow a mixed script types for older libraries.
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johnny22 3798 days ago
isn't that what <script type="module"> is for? it does "use strict" automatically
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alexkavon 3801 days ago
Down-voters should be required to respond if they're going to down-vote. Too often is conversation halted by negative people on HN.
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