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**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I guess as a counterpoint, rather than what I mean, is you can run any language on your server, and lots of people still choose to run Node. So even if other languages are good choices for parts of things, I don't think it's a JavaScript killer just because now you have the choice of your languag... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** People already choose JavaScript on purpose, \[laughter\] so unless some language can compete with that -- and obviously, there are languages that are good for different things, but until that fact goes away, I don't think we're really in danger of losing JavaScript as a primary language on the web. |
**Rachel White:** Yay! \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, people love to hypothesize that JavaScript will go away, but I think honestly those people are too smart for their own good; they're not thinking about accessible and easy JavaScript is to use as a language, and that's why it continues to get picked for all of this stuff. |
**Rachel White:** They're just jealous. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think that in the future - and this will sound contradictory - we'll see both more languages being used and more JavaScript being used. By that I mean there will continue to be these niches that are much better suited for a different language where people will use them, but the predominant, d... |
**Rachel White:** While you two were going super in-depth as to what is going on, I was reading more of Lin Clark's awesome cartoon intro to what makes WebAssembly WebAssembly, and what is it... If anybody else doesn't know what the hell it is - like me - you should go read it, because it's really good. And it also mak... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[16:22\] Yeah. I haven't had a chance to really dive into it yet, but there's a module spec in WebAssembly as well, so I'm gonna have to dive into that and see what that means. |
**Alex Sexton:** I think what that refers to is trying to cook into the JavaScript module system to where you can just import... Just like you would JavaScript, you would just do import blah from WebAssembly file. Maybe I'm thinking of something different, but that is a primary goal. But since none of that is actually ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a lot simpler than the ES6 module spec. But because it's so much simpler, I actually have a harder time figuring out how it fits into the spec. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I mean... What I'm saying though is that you can use WebAssembly as if it was a JavaScript file, as long as you provide an external API... So it fits inside the JavaScript one, or at least it's a goal. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. There's an export and import system, and stuff like that. Cool, okay... We're probably ready to move on to the next topic pretty soon, and when we come back we'll talk a bit about JavaScript in higher education. |
**Break:** \[17:44\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so what we're gonna get into now is a bit about JavaScript and how we teach computer science in higher education, like universities. Stanford announced that their CS106 course, which I don't know the significance of that, but apparently it is significant... |
**Alex Sexton:** It sounds very early on in the... It sounds like the first course you take at Stanford for programming language. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So basically when you first sit down and learn programming, they are getting off of Java and onto JavaScript? So that's great... So now instead of learning about crazy Java interfaces, they can learn about prototypal inheritance, and then never use prototypal inheritance when they get jobs. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I'm kidding... Anyway, it will work really well for all those terrible interview questions about how prototypal inheritance works. But this is a bigger deal than I originally glanced... It's been like a decade that they've been teaching Java, and there's some really good quotes in here from this ... |
He says, "Java came out in 1995 and it's really stabilized, but they thought that it was gonna be the language of the internet", and that was definitely how Java was sold, especially in the late '90s, early 2000s. This was the language of the internet, it was gonna replace JavaScript on the web, it was gonna run on a m... |
**Alex Sexton:** It runs everywhere. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[19:54\] Yeah, it runs everywhere - that was literally the slogan. But that didn't happen. This is not the language of the internet actually, and JavaScript kind of won that, so they're working to transition their 106 stuff over to JavaScript. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, that's great. I can tell you as someone who has a computer science degree, who did Java in his first two classes, that I spent 50% of my time understanding Java - which is fine... If you're learning Java, you should try to understand their primitives, and all that stuff... And then the other 50% ... |
The ease of getting started with JavaScript... Like, if you just wanna write JavaScript, compiling to anything or whatever, you're just doing programs for schools, and like they say, "It just must run in the latest Chrome", or something like that... Instantly everybody already has the environment to run that, and that'... |
**Rachel White:** So I'm actually wondering if this is going to help the students be able to debug things better? Because I do run a lot of hackathons -- well, not run... I work a lot of hackathons and have to help the students whenever they run into issues. And they're always using Python or Java, and they just don't ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, the tooling we were given in my class had some of this built into the editor we were supposed to use, but the ease of use of dev tools isn't amazing. There's still plenty of people I see just like "alert()" debugging but the ease of use of dev tools is certainly easier than running a stra... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And even to get to debugging, you have to render a program. And running your program in Java -- ugh! It's like 20 minutes to get the VM spun up etc. It's not really made for that quick turnaround time. I think between Node.js and Python there's not a huge difference. I mean, there is a big difference... |
So it's just a completely different and much faster and quicker to get to an error debugging mode for JavaScript in Python. In terms of the hackathons, when you get an error, you can google it and get a pretty good answer and understand what's going on with both JavaScript and Python... Whereas Java depending on the fr... |
**Alex Sexton:** Back when I was in school, I'd have a problem that I hit a bug, and you'd search for the bug - this was true of PHP back then too, but you know, I'm an old man now... But you'd search for the bug and you wouldn't find someone solving it, you'd find a web page that's their contact form returns that erro... |
\[24:19\] Unrelated to that, one thing I'd be interested in is how much it matters that people start with a dynamic, non-typed language. I feel like I'm in no way a purist when it comes to functional programming or typed languages... I pretty much thing that you can JIT your way out of all of those problems a lot of th... |
I almost see it as a feature that because of Flow and TypeScript, JavaScript is at this point almost optionally type. So I think it would be really good, and I don't know if they're up on their JavaScript enough to know this, but it may be really solid of them to say "Alright, do this one functionally... JavaScript is ... |
**Rachel White:** I'm actually reading deeper into this, and they're revising multiple of their CS courses. One of the that they offer is Computer Science and Social Good, which is kind of rad... They let the students see practical applications of what they'll be making, so they can get a better insight into what they'... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's California. \[laughter\] |
**Rachel White:** Oh, come on... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, I'm not hugely surprised of this move just because I've heard of... Feross Aboukhadijeh who does WebTorrent - he went to Stanford and he's been back to do random stuff with students there. I know that Guillermo Rausch who created Socket.io has done additional summer courses there, hel... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. They're not even the first major university to teach JavaScript as a core language. There are some very big ones that already do this, but I think the Stanford name, especially in the Valley, sticks out as interesting. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. To come back to your typing point, though... \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Uh-oh... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So now we can have like a proper argument... No, no, I just want to say... I come from a background -- I learned lower-level languages before I learned higher-level languages, and the people that I know that come from that background are not the people that are asking for types in JavaScript. It's ma... |
I don't know anybody who used to write Assembly and C who's writing JavaScript now going "You know what I really miss? I miss type errors. Type errors were rad." I just don't know those people... I've never met them. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[27:41\] I know a lot of people. I think people kind of avoid you sometimes, so... \[laughter\] I know plenty of people who feel very strongly about types, and have their good reasons. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I think it's silly to write off types as a thing that people don't need to l... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, when you learn a dynamic language, you learn about types... You just don't learn about static typing. You know what a string is, you know what an array is, you know that they're different, and then you also have to learn these coercion semantics, right? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but you don't learn about function overloading or pattern matching on arguments... There's a whole world around types that I think is worthwhile to learn, even if you don't agree that you want to be doing that for your types of programs. I think types catch a lot of errors that I don't have, or t... |
At Stripe we use flow against a huge portion of our React codebases, and we get very free, good documentation out of that. "Here's a component, here are all the props, here are the types of the props, here's a little generated component builder", to where it will give you the dropdown text boxes to fill in the props an... |
I think types enable some very beautiful things outside of just build time checking of enforcement uptypes. So whatever... People should learn types if they're getting a CS degree, regardless of whether they... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I think that you should kind of explain a little bit more about flow type in particular, but also the differences with typescript and traditional typing because it is a very new approach to typing. I don't think that I've seen the flow type thing in any other language or any other toolchai... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure, I agree. So Flow type and TypeScript are both supersets of JavaScript that you can write code in. You write almost exactly regular JavaScript, but then you might add a little typed definitions in the code. Flow and TypeScript are functionally equivalent. They have differences and different tradeo... |
One major difference is that TypeScript allows you to fully -- actually I think Flow allows that, as well... They both allow you to fully externally type things, so you can actually just reference code from a separate type file, and say like "This function over there is this", so you actually don't even have to markup ... |
\[32:04\] So you can have these little type definitions inside your code, and then whenever you call a function somewhere else in your code and you send a string to the place where it expects a boolean, before you ever run your code, these little checkers can npm-run Flow and it'll check to make sure that everywhere th... |
The coolest thing about it is that you can optionally enforce it. You can say "This little section of our code is really important that people use it correctly, and this section isn't. We have Flow here, we don't have Flow here." You could technically run like TypeScript and Flow in the same project, because it's all c... |
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