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0 pointsstcredzero8y ago0 comments

JS is a language and not a bytecode media.

That's an arbitrary distinction that's driven by developer group politics, not a meaningful technical distinction. (Much like the old Rubyist, "It's an interpreter, not a VM.")

Machine languages were originally intended to be used by human beings, as were punch cards and assembly language. There's no reason why a person couldn't program in bytecode. In fact, to implement certain kinds of language runtime, you basically have to do something close to this. Also, writing Forth is kinda close to directly writing in Smalltalk bytecode. History also shows us that what the language was intended for is also pretty meaningless. x86, like a lot of CISC ISAs, was originally designed to be used by human beings. SGML/XML was intended to be human readable, and many would debate that it succeeded.

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austincheney8y ago

> That's an arbitrary distinction that's driven by developer group politics

Not at all. JavaScript is a textual language defined by a specification. Modern JavaScript does have a bytecode, but it is completely proprietary to the respective JIT compiler interpreting the code and utterly unrelated to the language's specification.

> There's no reason why a person couldn't program in bytecode.

True, but that isn't this discussion.

tree_of_item8y ago

The point is that a "textual language defined by a specification" can serve the exact same purpose that a bytecode does. And JavaScript is very much on this path.

That is this discussion, because the fact that people program directly in JavaScript does not prevent it from being in the same class of things as a bytecode.

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