h335ian

So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the cray cray reactions? Just cause Trump I guess. For shame. Be nerds. Look stuff up. Stop with the hyperbolic “fascist” “coup” business. If you disagree with strategy, fine!! But at least recognize that these ideas aren’t new - nor fascistic - they’re inherently American and we’re in the midst of an adjustment cycle where these old ideals will be expressed in new modalities that we don’t all agree with. Doesn’t make it “fascist”. Ugh. So juvenile.

:point_up: this…

The article is purely a marketing piece. As we know with all tech, it’s how you hold it. Yes, you can certainly graph all the entities, activities & relationships - but there is the human tendency towards laziness, least path of resistance and the desire to show “look what I can do” that inevitably leads towards using using weak/garbage data without verification - often in the form of purchases/collected metadata.

Concrete example with a less scary outcome; I was involved in a project for real-estate marketing that used “quality” metadata to infer potential buyers/sellers/properties to target for a given marketing campaign and/or what marketing techniques/campaigns might influence a targeted entity. It was cool. For sure. But, due to the lack of integrity in the data, even with well known & trusted data (direct from the MLS) the result was a graph that made many very weak/inaccurate connections and resulted in a great deal of wasted marketing efforts/cost, targeting the wrong message to the wrong entity at the wrong time. Because it was still a major improvement over other tools in the space, it became the preferred path even with inaccuracies galore.

Now, imagine if the cost of inaccuracies is human freedom - vs wasted cents. Scary stuff.

It’s fair that there are proponents & value props beyond those early folks that came from the Java type world.

I guess I’m tainted/jaded by the early proponents and initial rationale that was absolutely tied to - “ewwww dynamic types!?! Gross, where are my strong/static types!?”. I’ve just fought that too many times - and that was a very strong argument at the inception of TS. There certainly are value props that go beyond and more to be discovered I’m sure.

I feel like MANY if not most of the devs I work with today simply use TS cause “that’s what you do these days” - but they have no clue what the “why” is and are baffled by native JS typing - and still consider JS “garbage” as a result. Bummer. In the Scala community I hear so much hate for NodeJS because it enables JS for server-side, “where it doesn’t belong” for many of these same old reasonings about typing (even with TS!?).

So yah, there’s value there, but you don’t NEED it to write large, good software. I’m clearly just jaded by the religious debates that have gone on and on - so despite their utility, I can come across very anti to the “solutions” to IMHO shitty arguments.

There it is… that’s the classic argument. Large teams/codebase. I totally get the appeal, but the idea this can’t be done effectively without it is nonsense. Long before TS, we had JS apps with teams of 50-100+ working across hundreds of not up to a couple thousand files - in CVS/SVN repos (ugh). I will concede that TS does help in the larger teams/codebases but - I will contend it is not necessary if your team is composed of folks that have depth of experience working without.

Classic example of comments I've heard since the 90s.

I’d strongly encourage doing a deeper dive here. Functions in JS are objects and can have their own methods/props + scope. They’re a first class citizen.

+1 - that was a really cool idea that I really was hopeful would take off.

Despite being down on all the extras, I wanna reiterate - I do think this is a cool project and I dig that HTAs are still around.

I think, based on many battles, a lot of folks in the early days that came from Java/C++ absolutely struggled with the key concepts of JavaScript, couldn’t find “features” (like strong typing) they claimed were critical for writing good software and invented ways to make the language fit their paradigm, rather than really deep dive into the language and embrace it. There were constant battles back then - and I’m sure the battles continue.

JS was certainly never a “garbage” language but the elegance is unappealing/unappreciated by entire classes of developers. I totally get the perspective, but it’s all based on a worldview that just doesn’t get functional programming

Firstly, it’s functional with closures… From there prototypal - so you can express whatever you want… the key is being functional. This was a key to the advent of JSON, but is also one of the most elegant and powerful bits of JS

Static/strong typing is not necessary in JS.

Yes, ES6 brings the OOPiness

This stuff pre-dates .NET and quite honestly I think that’s what m$ was going for in those early days. VBScript was pretty annoying and dealing with COM objects sucked badly. Back in the day we’d build in a local VB interop with JavaScript so we could make system calls and interact with native Windows stuffs. This predates JSON so at the time we’d use XmlHttpRpc to talk to remote/hosted services.

I’ll double down on the urge to drop TypeScript. That pile of nonsense came from the classic OOP folks - “But where are my TYPEs!? How do I know what type that variable is!?” (first the Java/C++ folks then the .NET folks “solved” the brain fuzz around functional programming and dynamic types by giving you TypeScript)

Having been out of the m$ ecosystem for some time, I’m kinda surprised HTAs are still around, I’m guessing to avoid breaking things. Once .NET started taking off - I always assumed that would replace the VBScript side of things and let you build proper, elegant system interfaces for your JavaScript app. I really imagined the goal was to drop Windows forms/object controls - but I always imagined BATTLES at m$ over being able to create Windows “apps” that didn’t conform to native UI controls, couldn’t be controlled through Windows theming engines, etc. kinduva brand control battle. I always imagined some team going “NOOO, just build a web app, you’re breaking all the UI rules!!!”

Been doing this since 1999. The only thing novel I see here is the transpilers - but you know… you don’t need that. You can build HTAs with native JavaScript, CSS and HTML - and with a little VBScript mixin, directly work with Windows libs. Back in ‘99 and early 00’s I was delivering “thin-client” control panels & management tools for server farms, sensitive accounting data, among a variety of other things. It was (and likely still is) a great way to provide a web interface as a desktop app for scenarios where exposing the management interface to the open web is undesirable.

Nifty project, but IMHO the world is better off using native JavaScript without all the BS that comes with TypeScript, etc. JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.