1mo ago

Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle | Deno

deno.com

JavaScript @programming.dev

Lena @gregtech.eu

1mo ago

Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle | Deno

deno.com /blog/javascript-tm-gofundme

Deno @programming.dev

Lena @gregtech.eu

1mo ago

Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle | Deno

deno.com /blog/javascript-tm-gofundme

18 comments

But this case is bigger than JavaScript. It’s about whether trademark law works as written, or whether billion-dollar corporations can ignore the rule that trademarks cannot be generic or abandoned. “JavaScript” is obviously both. If Oracle wins anyway, it undermines the integrity of the whole system.
If the law costs $200k to enforce, then the law already doesn't work as written.
Anyway, good luck Deno! We're all hoping you win this.
- It works just as the oligarchs intended
- Not me? I feel as if þis would put a major damper on þe user of JavaScript in all areas, which I count only as a net good.
How about we free the World from JavaScript instead.
- I wish wasm had access to the DOM
  
  My wet dream is Segmentation fault in Firefox
  
  I'll repost my comment yesterday about this very thing (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45279384#45283636)
  It's also too early to worry about DOM apis over wasm instead of js.
  The whole problem with the DOM is that it has too many methods which can't be phased out without losing backwards compatibility.
  A new DOM wasm api would be better off starting with a reduced API of only the good data and operations.
  The problem is that the DOM is still improving (even today), it's not stabilized so we don't have that reduced set to draw from, and if you were to mark a line in the sand and say this is our reduced set, it would already not be what developers want within a year or two.
  New DOM stuff is coming out all the time, even right now we two features coming out that can completely change the way that developers could want to build applications:
  being able to move dom nodes without having to destroy and recreate them. This makes it possible so you can keep the state inside that dom node unaffected, such as a video playing without having to unload and reload a video. Now imagine if that state can be kept over the threshold of a multi-page view transition.
  the improved attr() api which can move a lot of an app's complexity from the imperative side to the declarative side. Imagine a single css file that allows html content creators to dictate their own grid layouts, without needing to calculate every possible grid layout at build time.
  And just in the near future things are moving to allow html modules which could be used with new web component apis to prevent the need for frameworks in large applications.
  Also language features can inform API design. Promises were added to JS after a bunch of DOM APIs were already written, and now promises can be abortable. Wouldn't we want the new reduced API set to also be built upon abortable promises? Yes we would. But if we wait a bit longer, we could also take advantage of newer language features being worked on in JS like structs and deeply immutable data structures.
  TL;DR: It's still too early to work on a DOM api for wasm. It's better to wait for the DOM to stabalize first.
In a sane world Oracle would be laughed out of court, but Larry Ellison is a major political donor who's been cozying up to the Trump administration, so who knows if the facts actually matter anymore?
- I know!
  They don't.
[Oracle] denies that “JavaScript” is a generic term.
Sure, sure Oracle, no one uses it in a generic way. Side note, today I learned that Oracle owns the trademark.
I support the idea but is it really that important? It's just a name. Call it ECMAScript if you're worried. JavaScript if you aren't.
I'm for saying "fuck JavaScript" and moving on to something more sane. Even visual basic for the web would make sense. LUA for the web, or even Python, but fuck JavaScript.
I say let oracle have it. Let the language die.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- It would be really hard to coordinate such a huge move. And JavaScript is the most used language in the world, "letting it die" would mean making a whole lot of software die.
  This lawsuit isn't just about JavaScript, it's also to keep the integrity of the courts.
- Microsoft tried to add VBScript to Internet Explorer in 1996, and the ghost of it lurked around in IE until it was old enough to drive. It never caught on.
  
  VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn't care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.
  "AJAX" (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.
- I'm hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There's a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.
  Even visual basic for the web would make sense
  This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There's a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.

18 comments