| From: o1bigtenor via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | In this vein - - - - a contact who in computer terms calls himself a dinosaur | refuses to allow javascript on his computers doing all his browsing on text | based browsers. In his opinion javascript is a serious accident already in free | fall. What you're sharing only emphasizes that. Maybe its time to join his | anti Javascript position? The issues are a little more intricate. Note npm is a repo (mostly?) for JavaScript to run under node.hs. node.js is a server-side thing. It runs JavaScript on the server. Not in the client (browser). JavaScript itself isn't terrible. What is unfortunate, I think, is the unfettered creativity JavaScript in the browser allows web designers. They misuse it, just like they did Adobe Flash previously. To some extent this is caused by the good sides of JavaScript: how easy it is to learn, how easy it is to wip up complexity, how easy it is for the page creator to take control of the browser experience. What I was talking about was how easy it is to inject malicious code into the ecosystem. That isn't actually the fault of the language. (It is imaginable that one could design a language that prevented some abuse.) In fact, the language+browser have been designed to limit the damage that could be inflicted on the client side. The npn problem is mostly server-side, I think (I'm not sure). Making something easier (cheaper, faster, more understandable, ...) allows it to be used more, often to excess. Unexpected side effects can ensue. - increasing efficiency of cars makes driving cheaper so people drive more and end up using more total energy (gasoline). - computers became a lot cheaper. So a lot more money is spent on computers. - programming has become easier. So a lot more pointless programs have been created. - when I worked on optimizing compilers, I thought that I was trying to make existing programs run faster. Then it struck me that it allowed programmers to write programs in a simpler and clearer way and have the compiler eliminate the performance cost. Here's a random example of npm use: <https://www.electronjs.org/>