Re: [Editors] Re: [OSCOM] htmlarea project discontinued?

Guido Wesdorp wrote:
> Gregor J. Rothfuss wrote:
>> I'm not even sure if there *is* a Javascript community.
>>
>>
> Same here. I don't know of any efforts to get JS people together, 
> compared to what I know of the Python community JS developers seems to 
> be a group consisting mainly of newbies and people with a very specific 
> commercial target (e.g. Mozilla developers). I don't think there's 
> anything like a code repository, a central place to discuss language 
> issues, hardly any serious mailinglists, etc.
> This may have to do with the origin of the language, of course, since 
> the language *itself* is not 'open-source' (which Python of course is).

I don't think that's it -- C isn't really "open source," but at some 
point people consolidated and/or recreated an open source toolset and 
used the language in open source (/free software) communities.  We have 
an open source toolset for Javascript -- basically that's just an open 
source web server (Apache or others) and an open source browser (Gecko 
browsers).  Javascript the language isn't really changing, so it doesn't 
matter one way or the other if it's open source -- it isn't designed in 
any way that makes it inappropriate for open source.

I think it's really cultural.  There's nothing stopping Javascript 
projects from using all the same resources other open source projects 
use -- Javascript works just as well in a CVS or SVN repository, you can 
talk about it in mailing lists, you can download it from a website.  The 
remaining issues are architectural and cultural -- and I think 
architecture is part of the culture, as it is something people learn (at 
least in the open source community) from their peers.  Some of the 
challenges I see in current Javascript architecture are a tendency to 
bind Javascript to a particular website or layout, but that's something 
I certainly see a lot of progress on.  Testing is certainly another 
issue, and I don't even know *how* to do that properly in Javascript. 
Would Selenium work on a WSYIWYG?  That would be neat if it did.  But 
the purely cultural things -- transparency of development, using a good 
toolset (like source control), persistent connections among developers 
(you can't build a community of developers with an online forum), 
whatever that magic balance of leadership is -- these are things that 
are really lacking.

This culture wasn't lacking (IMHO) in other new languages, I think 
because even when Perl or Python were new, the people developing them 
*weren't* new to the process, and they set a standard (or continued a 
standard) for a new set of developers.  But there's isn't a heritage 
among Javascript developers -- there's a lot of kids, a lot of web 
designers turned programmers, a lot of people coming from a proprietary 
background, and not enough continuity with an older, more mature open 
source community.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  [email protected]  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org