On 2/5/2012 7:12 PM, Omar Gonzalez wrote:
On Sunday, February 5, 2012, Doug McCune<d...@dougmccune.com> wrote:
Just a final sentence: We are in 2012, and nothing changed. HTML5/JS/CSS
stack continues with the same problems and is inferior to what Flex/Flash
give us. I think 2013 will be again the same...
This is incredibly false and shortsighted. In the HTML/JS world an
INCREDIBLE amount changed in 2012. There was a huge amount of momentum
around microarchitecture frameworks, Backbone, KnockoutJS, AngularJS,
BatmanJS, and on and on. Frameworks that also include many UI component
pieces, such as jQuery, the recently updated Twitter Bootstrap, Sencha's'
ExtJS, etc. Coffeescript surged in popularity, which addresses many of the
"JS sucks" arguments that Flash devs often have. NodeJS kept chugging
along, becoming an actual option for a production server written in JS
(and
of course you can also write your server code with Coffeescript on top of
Node). JetBrains WebStorm now offers a solid JavaScript IDE. Areas that
have traditionally been dominated by Flash, like data visualization, are
being challenged by powerful JS libraries like D3.js (for charting and
data-viz), and polymaps (for geographic mapping), and WebGL content has
made impressive advances with libraries like Three.JS.
Saying nothing changed means you haven't been paying attention. HTML/JS is
changing faster than almost any other technology stack out there at the
moment. It has more momentum and developer interest than almost any other
technology stack. DO NOT write it off as being inferior.
^^^
Quoted for emphasis.
-omar
With all due respect (as I acknowledge Doug is right about how much JS
has evolved, and its momentum and developer interest), read this for
still valid arguments on the "inferiority" of JavaScript (as
Just-In-Time on-the-fly compiled source code) vs. ActionScript (as
Ahead-Of-Time pre-compiled byte-code):
http://blogs.adobe.com/avikchaudhuri/2012/01/17/the-v8-myth-why-javascript-is-not-a-worthy-competitor/
Having said that, every developer should learn as many languages and
alternatives as possible for his/her own good. Knowing other
languages/frameworks can only help improve those to which we can
contribute to.
Alexandre
