As someone who's new doing web programming, I nothing about firmware and end-user programming, and I'm curious about it. :p

Yeah, I guess firmware programming is much more complex than Web programming.

@@aryanmaurya3422 Exactly! That's why I'm curious about it.

@@aryanmaurya3422 I would say they are equally complex, throw node into the equation and you have server side programming as well as front end. Different horses for different courses as they say

@@aryanmaurya3422 it's not exaclty "more complex," it's just completely different and complex in different ways.

I agree much more with this than a single thumbs-up could ever express

Would definitely watch a video about this

I've found Rust language to remove much of the headache for me at least

@@sycration Yeah Rust is great and fast but it comes at a price, like you have to deal with ownership which can be a real headache. I've been writing some smallish glue code in Rust lately where I started out in pure 'cargo cult' mode i.e. copy/pasting existing code then adapt it. When some of the typical Rust errors hit me like optional values or, much worse, the borrow checker, I still resort to rearranging symbols in the editor until those errors go away.

He did not read the first chapter of POSIX Pthread programming book properly which said the exact same thing.

I love JavaScript and I hate JavaScript.

Since async/await, it's been a pleasure to write JS.

@@dakoderii4221 I just hate it and people think am being a fanboy of something else or whatever. When in fact am talking from 10+ years of writing the damn thing and having nothing but issues. I don't remember ever being happy that I had to write JS code. It always ends up being hacky and working around something.

JavaScript bad, please like and subscribe

Well, those who are most likely to want to talk about node.js are more likely to be those that enjoy working in Javascript. Those who do not enjoy Javascript will likely avoid node.js, with so many other event driven frameworks available in so many languages.

Who doesn't feel that way? Been coding for over 2 decades myself (I started on MS Basic and C back in MS/DOS), and I still get moments of wonder when I look at things like AAA games, where my brain just goes "And that's all just binary math inside a handful of transistors that somehow gets translated over and over until you see a person jumping and fighting"

@@marianoamar3867 The abstraction level is almost a daily thought for me as well. Unbelievable.

What the web stack has become is *far* worse than Flash ever was. It needs to be thrown away and replaced with something sensible.

@@rockets4kids kinda true imo. Although it's easy for me to say that because I don't use HTML CSS and Javascript on a daily basis. People who do though, might be more inclined to disagree simply because it's their job, or they don't want to relearn so many things. But in the end, it would mean that the web gets a MEGA PERFORMANCE BOOST. and a lot of things just become faster and might even allow for new types of web businesses based around this boost. 🤷‍♂️

@@rockets4kids what makes you say that?

@@JohnWalz97 It is a hodgepodge of bastardized technologies that requires an absurd amount of resources to be even usable. Worse still, it has become basically the *opposite* of what it was designed to be.

@@rockets4kids What was it designed to be?

I am using KDE right now lol

@@lukaspinoti107 saaame

The entire world of tech is built on open source

That is because html5 + cc3 are just perfect for GUIs, they are quick to use and easy to create stunning very personalized GUIs

+

No. Was expressing his amazement about the way a simple web based scripting languages can now be used to easily build useful online and offline apps.

I‘m not sure what you mean with 'all over the place' but KZfaq‘s personalization algorithms create really effective bubbles around you. If you never searched for any programming or other tech stuff you wouldn’t see this video anywhere.

As someone who knows something about programs and codes that run on your own computer, but knows very little about the internet I can confirm I understand very little. What I got from it is "Google made fast way of running code written in Java in their browser. People took it and started coding programs that treat themselves as 'in browser' even though they were only on your PC and not connecting to any server." I hope it is somewhat close to what he said. No idea why what they did would be so fast and better than coding a normal executable file though...

@@SKyrim190 Thanks. Although you seem to have sort of gotten the overall gist of it, the amount of inaccuracies in your summary still pretty much confirms that OP is not wrong.

Internet isn't necessarily bloated, but the reason why desktop apps consume so much RAM is because they are made using the Electron framework that uses v8 + chromium shebang to run scripts in JIT mode (like node.js). Instead of just running native code directly and not using JS :)

@@wk02 Yee, the _internet_ isn't bloated, it's just the interpreted languages created on top of it (javascript, html, css) Edit: i hav sqruare brain

@@zyansheep "dated languages" ah, yes, compared to the languages in which native apps are created, like C, from 1972.

I personally find Electron apps the single most atrocious things ever created in the digital landscape. The amount of bloat is absolutely abnormal (looking at you Microsoft Teams).

@@22RH544 if it runs fine on most systems and reduces the effort of writing and maintaining code it's not all that bad though right? I mean even I hate the fact that everything is so bloated now but also like, not everything needs to be all that efficient.

Ease of development/deployment with a huge increase in the number of software developers will do that.

@@_Dingu And don't forget marketing... that is the main drive as everything in our age.

@@IIARROWS obviously but marketing is fair game when you can make the claim that this language is all you need to know to make applications for 99% of devices.

@@adamjijo It depends what sort of apps you are writing because you couldn't write some types of apps on any platform with just trad js no matter how hard you tried.

And in many cases those dependencies aren't needed at all if you just take a minute to think about what you're doing. I've seen fellow students include Apache Commons in Java projects - for something like isNullOrEmpty(String).

I don't see how being a frontend developer is correlated with the number of libraries. C, Ruby and many other general purpose languages has ecosystems with thousands of libraries that do the same thing. Doesn't make it bad. The reason why it's seen as a problem in Node.js is because it's popular. It's easy for anyone to get started and use. The ecosystem grows as more people join. I see this as progress and innovation, even though you may disagree that something like left-pad is an innovation.

I don't think you understand either the analogy or javascript or restaurants.

I saw someone implement turing completeness with checkboxes and CSS. It was slow as molasses.

If it's not turing complete, it's not programming

@@NoNameAtAll2 Brainfuck is turing complete but I wouldn't call it a language. Brailsford's argument was very informal, that HTML is a language and it makes computers do stuff. Why make it more complicated than that? Brailsford is well versed in the theory of computability so it's not like he's naive.

@Kotetsu Chan HTML existed for 5 years before JavaScript, and 20 years before react - what do you think they were using it with?

@Kotetsu Chan who cares about react? It is not relevant to the conversation.

I get where you’re coming from, and there are many chromium desktop apps that do perform like garbage, but your sentiment also shares some parallels with Assembly programmers during the introduction of higher-level languages. Wasted performance can certainly be a worthy trade off for quicker development and maintenance, IMO, but I’m also pretty biased given I don’t actually create desktop apps in the first place haha

I think chromium is actually pretty nice... bringing some kind of open standard to the web-front world... not that browser-war stuff... but I'm fully in with you and the JS based desktop software xD

@@DeusGladiorum JavaScript isn't higher-level than existing desktop languages though

@@00O3O1B Chromium is open source. If you don't like the standards you can propose a new one.

Please, explain more. They probably have no clue what web assembly is :DD

Why DOESN'T C or Java work in the browser?

​@@carlosmspk Browsers need to have some measure of security, because you're basically running code someone else wrote. As such, Javascript has been the default way to write web applications since forever, and it interacts with the world through a set of controlled APIs that need to be secure. It's possible to "compile" (or rather, "transpile") C and Java into Javascript, effectively translating what should be C code into its equivalent in Javascript, but the result isn't always the best, and may be slow. One solution to this that was used in the past for running things like Flash were things like plugins, which operated in a container but you couldn't send people your own plugins without them installing them, because these plugins had to be in native machine code, which was a huge security risk, so only Flash really used this system. So, you had people who wanted to write in C or whatever other programming language they were already used, but translating that code to Javascript resulted in slow code. Plus, you couldn't just send raw machine code to people, due to security concerns. So, Web Assembly was created. What WASM is, is basically a type of "machine code", for a virtual machine. Basically like Java. It's still binary 1s and 0s, but if you gave it to a CPU, it wouldn't know what to do with it. But WASM is designed so that when a browser reads it, it's easy for the browser to then turn that code into safe machine code, that it can execute FAST (or at least faster than you'd normally be able to in plain Javascript)... Now you can write an app in C, compile it to WASM, and run it in the browser... Or at least that's the dream. There's still a bunch of features missing from WASM, and some interfacing kinks to work out, so its not in perfect condition, but it's thought by some that WASM will eventually replace Javascript on the web... I won't hold my breath tho.

Java isn't really popular for WebAssembly development. It's mostly Rust and C/C++ because they're supported "out of the box". There's also some Go and Blazor (C# front-end framework) development going on. There's also a new language that's almost identical (mainly different types) to TypeScript called AssemblyScript and it's gaining popularity.

Java isn't that's suited for Web development, it's more for stuff to run directly on a PC or for servers and enterprise stuff

Aa they say, unused ram is wasted ram

Well something has to push the sales of RAM, right? See, it's working!

16 Gigabits or 16 Gigabytes? Because 8 Gigabytes of RAM is still enough to run Windows 10 and a whole host of applications

@@i1a2159 Whole host of applications not written in JS+Electron presumably. Otherwise it would be 4.

​@@i1a2159 Gigabytes of course. Ram is always measured in gigabyte as far as I know. Also gigabit would be Gbit, GB and Gb both mean gigabyte.

a veeeery rocky beginning (when jquery was almost mandatory for standarization)

Did he say C# was synchronous? What?

@@sacredgeometry He did say that about .NET, incorrectly

C#/dotnet is still a synchronous language by default. You have to actively program it in an async/multithreaded way. Javascript instead is generally event driven, and many things are forced async like database calls with JavaScript promises. I still will always choose C# 10/10 times though.

@@Daktyl198 Nothing in JavaScript stops you from writing purely syncrhonous code.

@@Daktyl198 JavaScript is also single threaded, and used to use callbacks as a necessity, like how puny microcontrollers and operating systems still operate using interrupts. Async has been added relatively recently, but barely any longer ago than C# got theirs.

true except for the "cool, but" part

I wished Electron never existed, it gives JavaScript performance a bad fame

that's because each electron app is technically a full chrome browser

Also I'm like 95% sure Atom & Electron are completely unrelated applications

@@allie-ontheweb Electron is a framework, used by and originally written to power Atom, so they are not unrelated.

Technically all code is blocking, just that some code blocks more than others. For what it's worth, there are C (libc) functions that are labelled as "non-blocking" or "returning immediately", even though again, all code blocks.

it uses libuv under the hood which has a thread pool, instructions especially async will be thrown into that thread pool and wait for an output while doing everything else

Exactly. If the waiter is required to do 1000 pushups nobody is going to be served until he's finished.

Pshht. Let's not break their fantasy world. Single threaded non-blocking you just have to wait for next execution.

JS isn't even non-blocking unless you go out of your way to use asynchronous programming techniques. If you're trying to do actual computation instead of I/O... Well, to extend the metaphor, the chef might be too busy to take a new order from the waiter.

Sorry, that's my fault.

It’s mostly a bunch of elitist nerds gatekeeping their precious domain and paradigm. I’m seeing a lot of disinformation in the comments. I thought developers were meant to be intelligent and knowledgeable.

This is not a war. This is just a deserved burning of an abomination. As if JS had any chance XD

@@ephektz Seriously. You can argue the performance costs of a JIT-compilation-based language and there’s certainly issues that need to be resolved, but this attitude sounds just like stories of Assembly programmers scoffing at the introduction of human-readable, high-level languages. There are clear advantages outside of performance.

@@DeusGladiorum there are advantages to the developer sure But the user suffers

And it goes back much further than that. e.g. the 1993 NT beta version already strongly encouraged use of asynchronous IO in C / C++ and that remains the case.

More like event-driven rather than non-blocking. Remember, there is nothing called "async" and "await" back then, nor "Promise".

I was going to say something similar. What JS pioneered was basically getting multithreaded and non-blocking code to the Web Browser. But in Desktop and Server this has existed since computers were powerful enough to actually handle two processes at once

@@marianoamar3867 JS isn't multithreaded. JS essentially does what many languages traditionally used multiple threads for on one thread using its message loop. In fact, one of the big JS bottlenecks is that it can only use one core (at least unless you use webworkers, but that takes a lot more extra code since they can't share memory).

@@taragnor I know it wasn't multithreaded (specially with the loop). What I meant is that all these things JS pioneered on, they were all for browser based code (including multithreaded jobs now, because it does have those now). JS didn't really create anything new for programming languages, it just brought them to the borwser. And don't take that "just" as me being condescending or anything. I find what JS did for client side browser code to be amazing. I just take umbrage in suddenly everybody wanting to port JS to server, then to command line, etc; when there are definitely better ways to do those with other languages and tools.

Yeah, I've been doing Node stuff all day lol

Well, JS is platform independent and easy to use?

"Used by 3 billion devices worldwide"

But at what cost?!

@@alexxx4434 At the cost of computing power, which is not a limiting factor for most applications nowadays.

@@berndborte8214 What if every application starts to eat hundreds of megabytes of memory and CPU resources just to basically do the UI, will then it become an issue? We're heading there.

What I think he meant to illustrate with his restaurant analogy was asynchronous processing, as opposed to threads, since JavaScript is single-threaded. A threaded model of his analogy would be hiring a new waiter or waitress for every customer that comes into the restaurant.

vscode are built on the top Electron framework... it just javascript(typescript), css and html5

@@rickdev1922 yes - the vid says sth else

I dunno that I'd call Flash's performance "adequate" but it does feel like it runs a damn sight leaner than your average JS stack, I'll give it that.

you can get filesystem access from a chrome webpage if you design it as a PWA and ask permission from the user, no need for electron, you can even access the binary data of custom stuff you put on usb ports and write "drivers" for them in javascript, again, asking permission. That is more of a concern than electron doing it, because electron doing it is not a problem, electron is for desktop applications and it loads html that is bundled inside itself, it does not get its javascript css and html from the internet, they are bundled in, locally, so this type of security is not a concern for electron, it is not more dangerous for electron to access it that is for a C++ app to do it, the problem with flash doing it was because it was on the web, electron is not on the web, it uses the same technologies as the web but it is not on the web, it is local.

Maybe something like "tauri" could be used instead?

It depends on implementation, really. There are plenty of apps that end up using tons of RAM, but the best example of how it can be lightweight is VSCode. But, like everything else, if it depends on implementation, there will be a lot of bad apples.

@@wk02 I don't know what are the alternatives today for desktop apps, it's been quite a while since I've made one. But I don't think a messaging app like Microsoft Teams should consume 600MB of RAM

@@pacifico4999 I still can't understand how the same company can release both VS Code and Teams. One is lightweight, the other one is just garbage.

@@danielegvi vscode is really fast but it still uses a lot of memory (i opened up a few c++ files and memory rose to 300mb)

No, only Javascript can do that 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

what?

@@SamualN Yeah, this is sadly typical of people who've convinced themselves that node.js and JavaScript in 1996 are somehow similar. Modern JS, combined with HTML5 and especially when rendered more type-safe by Typescript, is an incredibly robust and performant language. Very large-scale backend systems use it all over the world.

@@SamualN this thing the guy blabbers about - a "chromium built-in into a desktop application" - turns simple desktop apps like chat or a text editor into ram-eating monstrosities like discord, Skype, vscode or slack. If you need 2gb of ram just for gui of your IDE, there's something wrong with your paradigm.

@@davidgillies620 It is incredibly performant. Speed at which it eats RAM is hard to describe with words.

Kotlin multiplatform could be interesting then.

You should be able to write frontend compiling c# to wasm already.

I prefer Razor pages without any JS at all, but if you want fancy JS-like interactions, there's Blazor

Just use wasm. Edit: if your language can be compiled to LLVM, you can compile that to WASM, then run it in anything that runs Javascript with just a bit of surrounding conde to run the WASM.

@@durnsidh6483 Blazor is a WASM framework...

And? It's not 90s anymore. CPUs are fast and RAM is cheap. Sure, a software written in C++ would be faster than a Electron based software, but it would take longer to develop it. On top of that, it most likely would work on only one platform. That's why technologies like React Native are getting popular. Developing this way is cheaper, and due to fast CPUs end users won't notice a big difference (in basic apps). However, I don't think JavaScript will replace C++ when it comes to graphics/audio processing any time soon.

@@yumeyuki1944 consider not only resources consumption, which is disputable despite the fact that CPUs get faster and RAM - cheaper (remember that joke about software getting slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster? not really a joke though), but also other things like attack surface.

@@yumeyuki1944 really hate web developers. You use the excuse of simplicity and cheap components just to release garbage software that just drains battery. Shame on you

@@yumeyuki1944 Consider the environmental damage due to higher energy consumption. JS programmers are killing the planet 🙃

@@yumeyuki1944 it may be 'cheap' but it isn't free dude

Because Deno is irrelevant, nobody wants to use it because it has taken out so much that made Node great.

@@diablo.the.cheater Can you provide a couple of examples of what was taken out that is critical to have in the language?

Yes, they did, they are called web workers, they work in other threads and you communicate between them and the main thread with messages, so thread safety is guaranteed, cuz no shared memory shenanigans.

A runtime environment for JavaScript, ie. a means to run JS on a computer outside of a browser, with access to filesystem, network, etc. Think "using JavaScript like you would use Python".

@@danielegvi Thank you~

Listen at 4:59, node.js is Google V8 wrapped in some code which allows it to run Javascript application on the command line or desktop in general. node.js is to javascript what CPython is to the Python language.

Consider yourself lucky.

Node.js is beautiful, welcome..

you can make desktop apps with python

It’s so ubiquitous now (and very much adjacent to what you already do) that it definitely won’t hurt if you were to dive in, regardless of what other stuff you’re eventually interested in learning or doing later on. There’s tons of other stuff out there though, too. It’s just that knowing and being well versed in Node.js (or just JS in general, really) is an extremely useful skill, of many in your toolkit.

Indeed. Atom is equivalent to VSCode in this regard

I dont't think he was talkig about atom the IDE but acorn atom the computer

Before being renamed to Electron it was called Atom Shell, he wasn't that much off.

npm promulgates marsupials

Inb4 people start shitting on golang under this comment

Robert has his own youtube channel btw.

Uh, it's BBC Micro's birthday _every year._ In fact, it's anyone's or anything's birthday every year that was ever born in some literal or figurative sense.

@@Anvilshock Meant to say 40th of course !

@@jms019 You do know you can edit comments, yes?

Yes they existed in C# before JS (.NET 4.5 in 2012 vs ECMAScript 2017), but Futures were proposed in 1977, and there were libraries implementing them way before C# had an async keyword or even node.js existed. Java 5 had FutureTask in 2005, for example. And goes without mention that even based programing has existed way before that.

@@trinidad17 Does Java 5 perform actual async or spawns a separate thread and if you want to (a)wait you'll block it?

That may be (I haven't used in C# recently) but before async/await Javascript let you do async programming with callbacks. I believe that goes all the way back to the late 1990s.

event loop isn't same as multithreading. more akin to async/await in c#

Async !== parallel

concurrency and multithreading are different concepts

Which most other modern languages also have. Both concurrentcy, multithreading, AND non-blocking IO/Processes

False advertising.

Should be renamed to neutronium :)

trying to change quantum physics 🤣🤣

Just boomers with a boomer mentality

CPU intensive tasks are definitely best left to write in a different language that compiles to something more efficient. But a nice strength of JS is how well it integrates with native modules and webassembly, so you can have the best of both worlds. Also, the app goes down when you block the main thread, not the worker threads, that's just how computers work though.

I have a production app in node.js and we use clusters to spread the load between all cores which works quite well with CPU intensive tasks.

@@jp46614 Was going to mention this. We run very CPU intensive tasks across manual node clusters (not autoclustering like PM2, Forever, etc.), and it really just comes down to designing it properly. Node does a lot more than people give it credit for, if used properly.

@@chrismanning5232 yeah we do that too. it all comes down to the design and how well you implement it.

@@danielegvi What does the main event loop do if all workers are busy? As I understand it you specify the number of workers upfront.

It's an issue with KZfaq, we have an open ticket with support since last year - extremely sorry and I'll try to publish them manually soon -Sean

@@Computerphile Aha, so much for Google's extensibility. Thanks for reply and for your work. :)

Deno really is so much better than Node in almost every way. I really hope it gets more packages created for it.

I like your profile pic lol

No you only need JS. stay away from node. Don't get yourself tricked into this mess of compiling CSS and HTML. Look at TailwindCSS which even though it is "compiled" it is not translated from 1 dialect to another. For php you should get into Symfony and twig. If you do need JS frameworks I wouldn't go past JQuery. Everything beyond Jquery was just trying to be fancy and turned web development into a nightmare. I have been doing this for 19 years now and I am close to changing professions because of what has happened to the industry these last 5 years. All these frameworks caused Adobe and others to give up Professional Visual editors like Dreamweaver because you couldn't support the frameworks in any reasonable manner and now we have to do Template alignments in code and tons of refreshes. In addition to working in DOS prompts with a new language/set of commands every month.

@@excitedbox5705 What’s wrong with css and html? And to be clear, I only know html css php and MySQL, I haven’t touched js yet, I still have yet to understand what a framework is, or even means... I also know C++, VisualBasic, and Java, but only in an IDE in school I will come back to this comment when I actually get a grasp of what you said, but rn calculus is taking up most of my time

You can’t outperform any Java backend. Huge high-performance systems are written in Java (and other JVM compiled languages such as Scala) - Kafka is an example. There are backends which use high-performance databases which are written in Java. The belief that the neat new language you have just learned is the best thing ever is extremely common, as enthusiasm can lead to huge productivity, but the structural and performance limits of a language can’t be wished away.