The tragedy of running an old Node project

The worst part isn't just that it's nearly impossible to run/update an outdated JS project, but that this process will repeat itself ad infinitum.

On the flip side, anything that uses vanilla JS without a build will most likely run just fine, probably till the end of human civilization.

I truly believe some flavour of "Javascript Classic" (some future state of JS before some big shift in syntax/mass migration to something else), C and x86 instructions will follow humanity for the rest of time. There will be javascript somewhere aboard the interstellar spaceships of the future, and we will still complain about it.

Yeah, starting to believe the hacking scene in the Matrix where the machine city was still running on IPv4 wasn't a blunder but foresight.

There will also be someone playing Tetris, Doom and Final Fantasy VI on their neural interface, long after all modern games have been lost to time (and DRM).

YMMV but I had a 4 year old project whose only dependencies were socketio and express and it booted right up. So stick to stable, mature projects and you're likely to be fine.

Well, even Fortran is still around us in some lapack code in numpy and in a lot of the stuff behing scipy, so, a lot closer than a lot of people can imagine.

Basically a lot of AI depends on a bunch of absurdly optimized numeric libraries writen in Fortran.

Fortran is well into the way at becoming a centenarian programing language at 74 years of age.

> it's nearly impossible to run/update an outdated JS project

You corrected yourself, but it's worth emphasizing here: a _NodeJS_ project, you mean.

Unless you're using non-standard APIs, stuff written to run in the browser generally keeps working just as well as it did before, no matter whether it was written 2 years ago or 10.

My grandchildren will live to see Vernor Vinge's programmer-archeologists troubleshooting PHP issues on the Wordpress install responsible for life-support around Alpha Centauri.

JavaScript will be killed off by WebAssembly.

Zombie JavaScript will be reduced to being glue code and then not even that.

I sometimes think about one of the Star Trek episodes where the ship was getting attacked by a "SQL injection", and I think that's pretty realistic

I think it was 'A Deepness In The Sky' that posited so many layers of legacy underlying the starship control systems of the era that one of the most crucial positions on a ship was that of 'Programmer-Archeologist.'

JavaScript will be killed off by webassembly for about 5 years now

The difference lately is the number of tools that are now in place for WebAssembly development and the new extensions to WebAssembly (WasmGC, Memory64, etc.).

Despite 28 years of effort at optimization, JavaScript is outperformed by WebAssembly. There's not much coming back from that:

https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-winamps-music-vi...

https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

What if your project is old enough to predate the modern "just use vanilla js, it's fine"? :tableflip:

j/k - I'm slowly removing all the Zepto code I have and it's usually a relatively quick search&replace.

Or until Google decides to change things to be more standards compliant, regardless of the collateral damage

Just watch out because socketio must be version matched for client-server or you will get the most annoying errors and state inconsistencies in the world. That's a scary production update let me tell you. Version 2.3.0 still scares me to this day after trying to upgrade that without production downtime.

?? JavaScript was outperformed by every language since it was introduced.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is what people put in their web pages.

Just bobble some programmers now.

Network effects are very strong for languages.

Better query languages than SQL could exist, but there's so much existing code and expertise out there that it's not worth the effort. Better backend languages than Java can & do exist but don't have the same enterprise popularity.

Developers, projects and companies have an immense incentives to target the most popular programming language.

That sounds great. Added to my list.

I adore the idea of somewhere on the Star Trek Enterprise, underneath the isolinear chips, the EPS conduits, the warp containment field control mechanisms, somewhere, if you dig far enough, override enough, you can get an LCARS screen that is all black, with a small `$` in the upper left and a blinking text cursor, waiting for a command.

Javascript is outperformed by WebAssembly in the sense that it runs faster.

A lot of things that bring a lot of value to a lot of people are still much, much faster to build via the JS / TS ecosystem.

It absolutely makes sense that calculation-heavy workloads will be ported to WASM, but there's a lot more to building an app.

But now JavaScript is no longer the privileged language in the browser.

With WebAssembly every language runs in the browser and runs better.

JavaScript's one advantage was that it was the privileged language in the browser. It has lost that now.

JavaScript has entered its Walking Dead phase. It will gradually be displaced by all languages compiling to WebAssembly.

> but there's a lot more to building an app.

Like what? Visual UI designers? WebAssembly's got you covered: https://platform.uno/blog/uno-platform-studio-featuring-hot-...

Running Visual Basic in a C# application compiled to WebAssembly? Sure, why not: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/

And what will prove that is adoption. As others have said, that has been “just around the corner” for years.

JavaScript’s main advantage is being commonly familiar to most software engineers.

The English language similarly lost its position as the preeminent imperial language a long time ago, so too with Latin & Rome. It takes a long time for a popular language to die because everyone wants to speak what everybody else speaks.

The Webassembly dev experience is awful, and it needs to be glued together with JavaScript anyway. 99% of web code doesn't care about the performance difference, and anything GUI is wasting more time jumping back and forth to JavaScript to save any time at all.

only after they make DOM access easier. see previous discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41955585

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41955488

This nearly impossible task took the author two hours

> The Webassembly dev experience is awful

It really isn't. Wasm is just a compilation target now.

WASM has a lot of shortcomings. You can't even update the DOM without doing a worker dance.

He gave up and went back to an old version. So we don't know if it was possible or not.

I am already a programmer archeologist, and it's one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Though my most recent project is regrettably well written and maintained. :)

im going to try and have this attitude