[EpicEng]

  "We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript"

Haha, that's funny. I guess all of the world's software runs on the web and is written in Silicon Valley. Oh wait, what's that you say, some programmers actually work on all those weird machines like satellites, assembly lines, medical devices, power plants, and even my car?! People actually write new operating systems, compilers, web servers, load balancers, and device drivers?! No way! Why don't they just make a web app for that stuff?

Yeesh. I realize that you can't please everyone, but some people chose to live in their own little worlds.

[matt2000]

Hey there, one of the creators of the site here. When we put this line on the site we never expected it to be this controversial! It isn't meant to be a universal truth, it's just in terms of a "website you join via pull request." So, perhaps better written as: "Almost everybody who works on a website knows JavaScript."

The satellite that you join via pull request can be written in whatever you want :)

[throwaway_yy2Di]

The satellite that you join via pull request

"Pull me up, Scotty!"

[EpicEng]

  "Almost everybody who works on a website knows JavaScript."

That I can agree with.

[shangxiao]

I would prefer to have that statement qualified with "knows of" ;)

[garrettdreyfus]

You can join any satellite by pulling hard enough.

[TrainedMonkey]

SpaceX rockets use C++, however if you can use C++ I really do not see how hard javascript can be.

[EpicEng]

It's not about it being hard, it's about this mentality that software == web development. There is so (so) much more software running different applications. I'm not saying that the developers of this site actually think that the world literally runs on JS, but I found that sentence amusing and somewhat ignorant.

I work in systems. I don't really know JS. I do know C, C++, C#, Haskell, various dialects of Lisp, Python, and Ruby however. Why would I subject myself to learning JS unless I absolutely needed to?

[TrainedMonkey]

My point was that JS is so much like C++/C#/Java that you do not really need to learn anything new. If you know any of those languages you can already hack JS.

[EpicEng]

Ok, but that wasn't my point. I am not under the impression that it would be difficult to learn javascript. The apparent assumption that all developers already know javascript is what is telling.

As to your point, I don't remember the last time I had to think about using '==' or '===' in C++. Semantics differences are huge, I don't care about curly braces and semicolons.

[noir_lord]

> My point was that JS is so much like C++/C#/Java that you do not really need to learn anything new.

Except Javascript is a prototype based language and the others you mentioned are all object based....but hey they all terminate statements with ; so must be identical I guess.

[TrainedMonkey]

Of course, the semicolons. Neither assembly nor python use semicolons, so by my logic they must be identical too?

Control flow, method invocations, variables, arrays, boolean logic operators, and general syntax are similar enough that you can look at the JS code and figure out what it is doing.

[shangxiao]

So I guess by that argument you'd put PHP in that family? ;)

[shangxiao]

Besides the fact that js is an interpreted dynamic language while the others are statically typed

[sitkack]

Syntax yes, semantics no. It is dangerous to lump all those languages together because they look similar.

[githulhu]

Compared to web development, those communities you mentioned are very closed to most people. With Javascript, there's no special equipment needed, and you can pretty much just pick it up and go...there's tons of freely-available knowledge in blogs, and open source code to read/get involved with.

Where's the github for assembly line firmware code? I would be very interested in learning more about other non-web-development domains, but it seems like unless you get hired right out of school to program something like cars or satellites, you're pretty much shut out forever.

[EpicEng]

There are plenty of repositories with code for micro-controllers and non-web related projects, but again, that's not the point. The single quote that "pretty much everyone knows javascript" was the focus of my comment.

Sure, maybe the author meant "pretty much everyone [who we think will be interested in our site] knows javascipt", but that's not what they said, and I don't understand that attitude at all. It's unnecessarily exclusionary, especially when their plan is to host content in a similar way to HN.

[githulhu]

Maybe another take on the idea could be to allow anyone to join who could sign in a with a github account that had had at least one accepted pull request on any repository. Easily hacked I guess, but perhaps that would solve the "just Javascript" problem while still serving to boost the average level of tech cred of submitters/commenters.

[krapp]

Surely there would be a way to check this through github's api once there was a username to check against. It sounds like a good idea and it might encourage supporting open source software while avoiding those issues.

But then I guess the downside would be fewer people contributing to your own site.