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by tonyarkles 5 days ago
> The JS ecosystem is not that old

I hate to tell ya this... LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript in 1995, and the first ECMAScript standard was published in 1997. So not 40 years old, but 31 years old.

NodeJS (liberating JavaScript from the browser) was first released in 2009... so again, not 40 years old, but old enough to have a drivers license.

I agree with you on the other side though: despite the language being relatively old and stable, it feels like the wheel's getting reinvented over and over again and "this will be a good enough pattern for the next decade" hasn't ever really shaken out, unlike Lisp or even Python.
1 comments
getpokedagain 5 days ago
I think I need to update my sales pitch for the passage of time. Emacs is probably closer to 50 now.
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taeric 5 days ago
Also notable that the way changes are introduced to the different languages is so different that this is just hard to really look at. Notably, elisp of today is not dramatically different from elisp of 20 years ago. JavaScript? Basically a brand new language after ES6+.
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conartist6 5 days ago
ES6 was released 16 years ago. I'm building on top of ES6 like it's rock solid, and so far I haven't been disappointed. After ES6 the langdev process changed materially, and it now rewards introducing language features that are, in my view, half-baked. I have had to take over parts of the work of the standards committee to be able to do this project at all.

I had to reinvent iteration to get both perf and abstraction at the same time: https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/spacetime

I also had to create records and deep freezing: https://es.discourse.group/t/proposal-records-a-new-one/2546...

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taeric 5 days ago
Right, but that about halves the age of JavaScript as noted in this thread.

I fully agree that it is reaching a more stable place now than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It is still nowhere near as old as elisp.

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conartist6 5 days ago
Oh for sure. I'm not trying to make a case against Emacs or Elisp or anything. Mature tech is highly, highly valuable. I just wanted to know if JS could do it. Could it, can it host a whole unix-y, emacs-y OS?
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