Game changer

I’ve been waiting for this and even started looking on porting V8.
I am glad that somebody already did:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/48651611/espruino-javascript-for-things

I think this is going to be a game changer.

why is JavaScript better than c#?

@ Architect - Drat you, Architect! Don’t feed my KS habit. :slight_smile:

@ Mike - More people have experience with JavaScript, by far. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer .NET to most anything else, but I’ve come to appreciate JavaScript. For all its rough edges, there’s a simplicity to the language, for getting started, but more importantly there’s a ton of flexibility inherent in using a dynamic language. And the part that makes it a big deal is the ability to modify the program while its running, without having to re-deploy.

Definitely not something that fits every need, obviously, but it’s cool enough that I backed it. I like the idea of writing IoT with JS.

Totally agree with Andrew.

There is a lot of JS people that were “afraid/not comfortable” to play with electronics. For various reasons - need to learn VS or learn new language or start using the whole new operating system (windows). Having JS capable micro controllers opens a whole new world for them.

I believe JS on a MCU is going to be huge!

P.S.

They already have binaries available for various boards (discovery is one of them).

@ devhammer - I did five years of commercial product development using java, and while I found it acceptable, I never was a big fan. it was not the language, but rather the style of the library APIs.

Java and JavaScript are completely different languages.

I was looking at this yesterday and was really hoping you all wouldn’t convince me to spend money on it… :wink: I like the idea. It looks like a good start. I’m not crazy about the board design.

GHI would be wise to get involved in this idea. JS + Gadgeteer would be the bees knees! I’ve spent more hours in the past several weeks preparing for & teaching Gadgeteer workshops than I want to think about and something I’m noticing a lot more this year than last is people showing up with laptops that don’t run Windows and they don’t want to setup Windows even in a VM. If Gadgeteer never breaks out of the Windows-only lock then the market will forever be limited. This idea used in combination with a more advanced debugging IDE & Gadgeteer modules would solve this “problem”.

I am not familiar with IDE design but you would have thought that C# and .NETMF could be developed using the likes of Eclipse and then this would give you cross platform development.

Android allows development on any machine out there (within reason of course) and as you said Ian, if MS don’t do something about this, they may lose out to emerging technologies such as this JS system.

Of course, Eclipse has it’s detractors but I have been comfortable using it for development both in Android and C/C++ with Netburner. You learn to work around the small issues :slight_smile: After all, nothing is ever going to be perfect.

I’m with Ian on the board design. It requires a lot of soldering to hook it up. If they are aiming at newcomers who are not hardware based, a set of connectors with screw terminals would have been a lot nicer. This makes it a little more expensive, but you would likely have a better chance of selling this to non-electronics bods if this was the case.

Definitely interesting. The fact that it runs on a $5 micro is a biggie. A barebones Cerb40-style board could be put together for what, $10?

I am not worried about the board design. As soon as his js code is open I am sure there will be plenty of boards.

And as @ godefroi said, the price of these boards should be very attractive.

By the way you don’t need an IDE for that board. You can program it from your browser.

I’m not as concerned with just programming as I am with debugging. I’m curious to see more about how that works and if it has enough interactive capability.

Even if it is not there yet, it should be possible to add something similar to V8’s debug protocol.

This is one of the reasons I stayed away from Arduino. No native debugging.

I hear lots of programmers saying you don’t need in circuit debugging and you can get by, by toggling port pins etc but personally, I never found this method very productive. :slight_smile:

But all those, who forced themselves to switch to using debuggers, never came back :slight_smile:

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I agree with @ Architect that this probably will be a really big thing, but it’s not for me.

In my job I work for a fairly large financial company in their web development department. Part of my job is to do code and security reviews on released software. I love to review C# code, but hate to review javascript code. The C# code tends to be well formed, organized, and follows good coding practices. The javascript code… not so much. This is not an inherent problem with javascript, but it’s the fault of the programmer that is doing the coding. Javascript, IN MY OPINION and experience, tends to attract coders that either don’t have formal training, or that are not well discplined. The coding is sloppy, uses lots of global variables that are distributed amongst several files, is not formattted well, and uses short cryptic names for functions and variables, making it difficult to understand and debug.

As part of my job, I also look at lots of javascript based libraries and enhancements, and many coding examples on the web. There’s lots of cool stuff out there, but IN MY OPINION, it just adds to the complexity and unreadability of the code.

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@ jasdev - I tend to agree with you… it is not for me either. I also feel that I still have so much more to learn about NETMF that I hardly want any more distractions. At the moment with the toys I already have, I hardly get enough time to fully explore them. And if I ever need a small peripheral board with cheap micro, then I will prefer to just use a PIC or AVR and program them in C which I already know how to do. I dread having to learn yet another programming language.

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Looks like an interesting idea. One thing i did like was this mention…

Nice to see those words alongside other hardware with uino in the title :slight_smile:

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When I saw it a couple days ago, I was … meh

I’m sure it will appeal to segment of the industry, but not for me. For myself, I don’t see this adding anything new for me.

I wonder how many web developers that are thinking to themselves … “if only I could develop in JS I could create IoTs.”

There are differences between the languages, but I think that most JS devs could jump right into Arduino and become productive fairly quickly.


Hey MS guys, are there any statistics on how many Win RT apps are developed in HTML/JS?

Nice catch, I hadn’t noticed that. Agree completely that’s great to see. :slight_smile: