GNOME project picks JavaScript as "first class" dev language

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/gnome_standardises_on_javascript/

by iProject • 13 years ago

146 131 13 years ago

theregister.co.uk

tikhonj• 13 years ago

Well, it's an answer to the paradox of choice.

Also, JavaScript is not a bad language for UI development at all. It certainly has its warts, but I liked it more than the other frameworks I've done UIs in: Java Swing, Perl/Python Tk or Haskell WX.

Admittedly, I really liked the FRP logic part with Haskell, but actually using wxWidgets was pretty poor. Also, JavaScript has some very compelling FRP libraries itself which could probably be adapted to work on Gnome.

damian2000• 13 years ago

FRP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming

camus3• 13 years ago

Well,I wish we had ES4 instead, which would have been even better but thanks to Microsoft,Yahoo and Mozilla betrayal this will never happen.

The irony is when Microsoft comes up with Typescript because they now think javascript is not good enough.

Eventually Javascript will look like Python.

psionski6• 13 years ago

...and Microsoft already had WPF... Isn't everything else VERY primitive compared to it? Why would they go back to an inferior technology? Adoption issue?

mnutt• 13 years ago

Wasn't Mozilla the one pushing for ES4?

tracker14• 13 years ago

Take a look at CoffeeScript if you want python-like style..

CJefferson• 13 years ago

While that is the title of theregister's piece, it is not true. The bindings of no other language are being removed, the GNOME project has just decided what answer they should give to the question "What should I write my new app in", and to try to get one language's documentation up to really high standards.

zapdrive4• 13 years ago

Yea, the title is misleading, as down there in the article they clearly say that JavaScript will just be given priority, and work on other languages will continue.

reidrac• 13 years ago

Further info: http://treitter.livejournal.com/14871.html

In fact I recommend reading the comments.

EDIT: ah, I didn't notice the reg linked to the blog post (I got distracted by the inaccurate title). Well, that's the source anyway and my recommendation stands.

Kudos to Travis Reitter for replying to the comments.

sandGorgon4• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what happened to Vala[1] and why it was not picked ? It seems to have a huge amount of traction[2] and generates compiled code (which seems to me as performant than Javascript)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_%28programming_language%29 [2] https://live.gnome.org/Vala/Documentation#Projects_Developed...

jitl• 13 years ago

Mostly because Vala is a GNOME-only language with no external support or buy-in. It'd be rather insular of GNOME to say "if you want to write apps, then learn our new, GNOME-only language."

sandGorgon4• 13 years ago

Vala is modeled after C#, which probably is (empirically) the most popular desktop app development language.

genuinely curious : In general, do we see a lot of desktop app developers coming from the web world on Linux ? I'm pretty sure that is not the case in the Windows world. In fact, more often than not I have seen die hard fanatics ("interpreted languages sucks for desktop apps!!" vs "C++ sucks") on both sides unwilling to cross over.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

I think they (GNOME) would like to 'lure' more web-centered developers to their platform so that's why they chose JS.

But there's a fault in their thinking IMHO. Web guys are web guys for one reason: They sincerely believe web is the future and better than native desktop software. (For some values of better.)

And then there's the other big group: The native desktop devs who don't think JavaScript is a good choice for a native platform as there's already a big eco system of C/C++ code supporting this platform and why make the extra work of creating JS bindings? (I'm one of these guys - though I don't develop for GNOME.)

So all the GNOME guys do with this decision is to alienate their existing developer base while not really attracting any new devs to their platform.

Personally I think Vala was/is a perfect language for their platform. It's sad they they gave up on that.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Web guys are web guys for one reason: They sincerely believe web is the future and better than native desktop software.

Maybe; how does that fit in with PhoneGap?

psionski6• 13 years ago

PhoneGap is about marketing, not about software. For customers it's difficult to find a specific website, but it's easier to find an app in the app store. The devs are still web guys, but thought they will sell more if it looks like a "real app".

aeosynth• 13 years ago

To quote the phonegap devs:

http://phonegap.com/2012/05/09/phonegap-beliefs-goals-and-ph...

> The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

buster6• 13 years ago

Agreed with that, although i tried getting into fixing a bug in Geary (a Vala written mail client) and documentation was so scarce, i gave up on it early on, before wasting hours of trying to figure out Vala. It seems to have gotten better, and they added lots of stuff on https://live.gnome.org/Vala/Documentation BUT for example, i'd like to open and write a sqlite database. There even is a vala binding: http://valadoc.org/#!api=sqlite3/Sqlite

It's much harder to figure those out than the usual bindings let's say http://docs.python.org/2/library/sqlite3.html . There is some Database class. But apart from function names no documentation is given at all.

With the python version (and most likely ruby, perl, C, etc.) i can start immediatly, there are examples and everything.

No, why should this be different with the gnome javascript bindings? What happens if there is no binding? You can find lots and lots of bindings for the major script languages and it is easy enough to create one yourself thanks to boost and SWIG and ctypes in python.

kayoone• 13 years ago

But then theres PhoneGap and there was WebOS from HP which both are/were pretty popular with developers

cduser• 13 years ago

Mobile apps are on the rise. Native apps are not.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> Web guys are web guys for one reason: They sincerely believe web is the future and better than native desktop software.

That's probably only a very small, but very vocal group of developers; those that seem to spend more of their time on writing about their work and their unique insights into how software development should be done (all inferred from their petty front-end dabbling) than actually doing something productive. The vast majority of web developers is developing for the web out of necessity, not because of some grandiose spiritual self-delusion.

I do of course agree with your view that this move will neither attract new developers nor keep existing developers happy.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

> The vast majority of web developers is developing for the web out of necessity.

I wouldn't call it necessity. I, for one, like the openness of the web, how it allows me to deploy software to all my users at the same time, the customization, etc. I don't believe it's the holy grail, but it's hardly out of necessity that I develop for it.

earnubs• 13 years ago

"all inferred from their petty front-end dabbling"

Oh my, your horse, it is so high!

pfraze• 13 years ago

I can't speak for everyone else, but as somebody who writes a lot of Web software and very little blogs, I can say that I have plenty of grandiose spiritual self-delusion.

I may not be close to the metal, but I write good software.

tracker14• 13 years ago

I spend far more time writing back-end code (automation, data handling, and services) more than I do front-end code. Most of that code is so that the front end can be nicer. Just because the UI I develop is web-based, doesn't mean I don't know how to write effective code. I do think that JS is an acceptable language for UI development. It is hands down the most widely used language on the planet. Gnome isn't deprecating the other interfaces, it's just that they are steering new developers to the JS interfaces. I do think that the Python guys are having a pretty bad attitude about it though. They had to pick A language as their base for documentation purposes, and I think JS is probably the most pragmatic choice here.

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a JS fan (warts and all), and with NodeJS and MongoDB it's been a far more fluid development experience than other groups of technologies I've had to work with over the past 17 years in software development. It's a pretty decent language to work with.

jasonlotito2• 13 years ago

You can still use C/C++. The headline and article are misleading. You can also use the other bindings available. However, they can't support everything under the sun.

stuaxo• 13 years ago

Vala does look good.

When it comes to language bindings GObject creates bindings for multiple languages. I know I'm only ever going to use Gtk via python personally.

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

The web is great and all but there are times when I want something with better desktop workflow integration.

Being able to reuse a chunk of code written for the web and integrate it into gnome could allow for rapid development of lightweight applications for the desktop.

Since the Linux desktop is still a minority platform, anything that makes it easier to port apps there without digging into python/mono/C++ is a win.

In fact with MS adding first class JS support for metro apps there might be an opening for a cross platform library that pops out Metro and Gnome apps.

correnos9• 13 years ago

The whole point of simplified languages like Python is that it isn't digging -- the basics of the language are super-easy to learn, and GNOME's bindigs make it easy to hammer out simple apps in it without fuss. If this move was purely choosing a "lightweight" language, Javascript would have scarcely been considered purely by virtue of its boatload of gotchas.

As for code-reuse, most any web library you could care for has probably been done, better, locally. The only allure of Javascript libraries are that they can be utilized in the browser, and since GNOME JS code relies on GNOME-specific APIs you don't even get that benefit.

GTK already allows you to write cross-platform apps. Javascript isn't going to improve matters there.

muyuu7• 13 years ago

Gnome want their own wallet garden.

Charging for software is somehow evil, but wallet gardens with "road tax" are somehow acceptable and people are getting used to them.

Makes sense for them I guess, but I'm going to continue ignoring Gnome as I've been doing since Gnome 3, as they have made very clear I'm "outside of their target demographic".

mertd3• 13 years ago

Where is the wall? It is an open source project.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

> The native desktop devs who don't think JavaScript is a good choice for a native platform as there's already a big eco system of C/C++ code supporting

Not only that there is a sane language like Python, there is Vala as well. There are already are good binding for both. GNOME should have marketed the hell of out of Vala, I think.

I think GNOME should have played ball better with Ubuntu. Now they sort of got pushed to the back a bit and they are trying to be "cool" again. But as you said, there is only one latest cool platform and that's the browser.

If I want to write a "app" for GNOME I would write it for Ubuntu's Software Store, I wouldn't write it for GNOME desktop.

millstone• 13 years ago

What is the most sophisticated GNOME app written in JavaScript thus far? Honest question.

quarterto• 13 years ago

Large parts of GNOME Shell are written in GJS using GIR hooks to LibMutter and Clutter.

PommeDeTerre3• 13 years ago

Given that GNOME Shell is one of the most criticized and outright hated pieces of open source software, it isn't a very comforting example.

slashclee2• 13 years ago

That's true, but also irrelevant. GNOME Shell isn't an app, it's part of the infrastructure.

Rhythmbox? C. Evolution? C. (Geary? Vala.) Shotwell? Vala. LibreOffice? C++. gnome-terminal? C.

There are no GNOME apps written in JavaScript yet. The fact that they're using it in the shell is promising, but if they want app developers to pick it up en masse they need to lead by example.

Andrex2• 13 years ago

Parts of Gnome Shell itself as well as Gnome Documents: http://treitter.livejournal.com/14871.html

buster6• 13 years ago

I don't know if i really like that approach. I'd much rather prefer Python or even C/C++. There are already so many desktop bindings for Python, why going through the hazzle to support all this in javascript? The documentation will be poor, many libraries will be missing, the learning curve will be high in the beginning. My guess is that the Gnome team wants to take advantage of the amount of Javascript capable developers. But seriously, will many of those website/html/css/js developers write a desktop app where the overall community spirit is to replace apps with websites?

matthiasv• 13 years ago

You are probably not aware of the GObject Introspection mechanism that is available for quite some time now. Any compliant GObject-based library can be used by any language that supports GI through an intermediate representation of the classes, interfaces etc. So, you don't need to write any bindings, neither for Python, JS, Java, Go or whatever.

buster6• 13 years ago

Question is if there is a GObject based library for everything a developer likes to do?

jasonlotito2• 13 years ago

You can still use python. Read the blog post linked to in the article. They aren't removing support.

msie• 13 years ago

Doing some work in Mono/C# and it rocks. That would make a way better choice than JavaScript.

petercooper2• 13 years ago

It's been a long time since I looked into GNOME dev but that was the main choice for the last 10 years or so, wasn't it?

ebassi• 13 years ago

no, it wasn't - mostly because of political bullcrap coming from the "I'm purer than thou" crowd. obviously, the biased perception that gnome was using C# exclusively was also due to the same crowd.

this also led to the C#/mono platform lagging behind, so that these days writing gnome apps in C# means using deprecated libraries, which is unfortunate.

antihero• 13 years ago

This is absolutely laughable. If you make an API, you make it language agnostic.

I can understand if they are recommending it, but I'm not sure lowering the barrier to entry so low that you're going to have an absolute tonne of horrendously written, likely insecure apps, is all that good.

maheart2• 13 years ago

The GNOME APIs are language agnostic. They're a fantastic example of language agnotism. Anything written with the Glib library or libraries that have Glib bindings for them, can be accessed from any language that is GObjectIntrospection-able: currently this is Javascript and Python, but there might be more.

>> lowering the barrier to entry so low that you're going to have an absolute tonne of horrendously written, likely insecure apps, is all that good.

I disagree. One of the most common questions about opensource projects is "where do I start contributing?", and the FOSS community admits that the initial contribution barrier is high.

Horrendously written apps I can live with: I just won't use them. Regarding insecurity, I'd much rather an insecure desktop app than an insecure web app (that might be accessible to the world).

shawn-butler• 13 years ago

RE: bindings other than javascript/python [0]. I have used the Go binding.

[0] https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection/Users

stephen_g2• 13 years ago

The APIs are written in C, and have bindings to most languages.

Recommending is all they are doing here (the title is quite inaccurate)

_Simon• 13 years ago

Describing the title as "quite inaccurate" is very generous. "deliberately inflammatory in order to generate page views" is much closer to the mark given that the article came from the register.

pre• 13 years ago

Sole?

> "We will continue to write documentation for other languages"

I think you mean 'primary'. Everyone who loves C or Python or whatever will continue to be able to use C or Python or whatever.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

That is a misrepresentation. They are just going to recommend JavaScript if people ask which to use and focus on supporting that. Not forcing people to drop other languages.

My question is, what about people that like JavaScript derivatives like CoffeeScript or LiveScript?

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

I guess they just compile them to JS as they would for the web. On github I have seen a few gnome3 mods written in coffeescript.

chris_wot6• 13 years ago

I'd like to see LibreOffice rewritten entirely in JavaScript.

maheart2• 13 years ago

Hard to tell, but I'm guessing this is sarcasm.

This would definitely be possible. When GNOME say "Javascript", they actually mean Javascript + GObjectIntrospection + any C libraries that are written with Glib or libraries that have Glib bindings for them.

Javascript will end up calling C code.

chris_wot6• 13 years ago

Not at all. I'm quite serious. I'm actually interested to see if this could be done.

But this is very interesting :-) Can you point to any documentation?

Edit: the issue with porting LibreOffice to Javascript is the sheer size of the codebase. I don't suppose anyone has a block diagram anywhere of OpenOffice/LibreOffice that divides it into modules?

I mean, how do you tackle such a massive codebase? It looks like Michael Meeks has a good idea about this, but the biggest problem with the codebase is that there isn't any high level, quality documentation that shows how it works.

Also... and this is probably just me, but I can't even find the entry-point to the code. That's always been my issue with these apps, but that just shows my exceeding lack of ability in C++ coding I suspect.

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

Closest it probably google docs.

diggan• 13 years ago

Checkout Google Drive (former Google Docs).

AnthonBerg2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but the intuition-less "practical" decisions of GNOME of late only make me think this now:

Q: What do GNOME developers really want? A: Who cares?

chris_wot6• 13 years ago

If you were a comedian, I'd heckle.

AnthonBerg2• 13 years ago

I'd understand.

estavaro• 13 years ago

It's an OK choice. I'd rather they picked Dart instead. Dart has a better OO support and a cleaned up core language. But it's early days for Dart still.

Dart has a VM by the same folks who created the JavaScript V8 Engine and they say that they expect Dart to be faster than JavaScript in a number of ways. Part because Dart's code is less dynamic than JavaScript's. Part because loading Dart files could use a pre-parsed file.

You can work on documenting Dart code by adding types to the APIs as it's optionally typed. Dart on the browser gets translated into JavaScript for deployment making the issue of not having a Dart VM everywhere less important.

One of the niceties of Dart is that before deploying, code gets reduced by removing unused code with a tree-shaking algorithm based on Dart's less dynamic features.

  class Dart extends JavaScript {
    var points;
    Dart(this.points = 10);
  }

That's a sample Dart class with default constructor parameter.

StudyAnimal• 13 years ago

Oh man! I just learned Guile!

josteink• 13 years ago

They say Javascript is good because it's self-contained with no core library, which is fair enough.

I'm curious what engine they've decided on using though. As far as I can see, that has not been mentioned. Anyone got any intel?

adam-a2• 13 years ago

Spidermonkey I think. https://live.gnome.org/Gjs

mariusmg• 13 years ago

And thus the road to irrelevancy begins....

xutopia• 13 years ago

I don't understand why all the hate. Javascript is the fastest growing language right now and there is no sign of slowing down. My question is why would they pick another language over this one?

keeperofdakeys4• 13 years ago

Javascript became the language of the web because it was there, and people adapted. While it may be secured in the web, I think it's a mistake to pick such a, for lack of a better term, horrible language for programming on the desktop.

As a language, javascript feels less complete when compared to other languages (like python). The weak-typing is especially bad, leading to inconsistent results. More time/effort is then required to write a good application, which I think is unacceptable.

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

Javascript has the advantage that most of the millions of web devs out there have used it or a language that compiles to it at some point.

By comparison python is a relatively niche language.

It also has the advantage of allowing web devs to port their web code over easily to a desktop app.

tracker14• 13 years ago

You compare it to Python, then complain about weak typing?

psionski6• 13 years ago

Bamboo is also very fast-growing, but we don't use it for desktop application development. We use it for making huts, preparing food and treating infections.

I guess my point is that growth doesn't matter when it's in another sector.

VeejayRampay• 13 years ago

Maybe because Javascript achieved that growth and subsequent ubiquity not on its technical merits but because and only because it was the de facto language of the web (and still is to this day for a reason that still eludes me).

Funny how the number of languages a programmer can pick from is growing every day, but on the one HUGE platform that is the web, it's Javascript or nothing. And by funny, I really mean extremely annoying and a severe regression.

urlwolf• 13 years ago

I'm using gnome shell and I love it. I moved to it from awesomewm, so that gives you an idea of the type of user that I am. They made some bold moves on UX, and I was surprised I was agreeing with them. There's a tiling wm extension, shellshape, that has advantages over awesome (!). I'm happy with the move. This is just to say that gnome is not targeting grandmas and teenager with their redesign. If you were used to gnome 2 desktop (which I hated) give 3 a serious try.

apaprocki• 13 years ago

Back in 2005 at Bloomberg we decided to move all Terminal app development to server-side JS, using a homegrown system built on top of a custom GObject (GObjectIntrospection didn't exist at the time, so we made our own) and SpiderMonkey. IIRC, GNOME was starting to experiment with JS around the same time. JS isn't for everyone, but it certainly makes app development faster than writing apps in C/C++.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

>>> Today, Reitter says that question has “about 8 different personal-preference answers”. That's not helpful because “... it drives people away from our platform. Having to potentially evaluate several different languages and their stacks gives potential developers a lot of unneeded extra work.”

That makes absolutely no sense. You aren't going to evaluate GNOME as a C developer and thinking about whether or not you're going to use the Python bindings--you're going to use the C bindings. This is just garbage.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

I thought when you were making a desktop application for linux distros it wasn't supposed to only work on one DM. Why would you have to specifically think about gnome when you're making one?

wmf• 13 years ago

If you're writing an app that uses GNOME libraries you'll probably be thinking about those libraries quite a lot.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

Problem: too much choices. Solution: let's introduce one more choice, and a crappy one while at that.

correnos9• 13 years ago

Fitting that the article should end with the "best tool for the job" defense. This argument seems to be used almost monotonically to justify poor language and design choices.

This move is bad for the GNOME project as it has the potential to knock the quality of new GNOME apps down to the quality of the average web app. They're robbing themselves of the benefits of native development and, due to their GNOME-specific APIs, not even getting portability in return.

Andrex2• 13 years ago

I don't think I've seen a more inaccurate headline stay on HN for so long.

JS isn't the sole app dev language and it won't ever be. It's the language they chose to prioritize resources for tooling, documentation, and evangelizing of the platform to new developers.

A better, more thoughtful explanation is at the developer's blog, which I hope the OP link is replaced with: http://treitter.livejournal.com/14871.html

GNOME project picks JavaScript as "first class" dev language

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