Tim Kevin Oxley timoxley

I have been watching the current discussions about running a virtual DOM in a web worker with a great deal of interest. In 2011, I built a research project, [Treehouse][] ([USENIX Talk][] ([DOMTRIS][] demo at 20:25), [paper][]), which ran a hacked-up version of jsdom in a worker. My goal was fine-grained containment of untrusted scripts, while still providing access to browser APIs that existing code expected.

Treehouse achieved a small amount of influence in academic circles, but it had problems and was ultimately unsuccessful. Virtual DOMs were not a widespread or well-understood idea at the time, so the advantages of running one in a worker

agnostic modules

Most of the modules I write are "agnostic" in that they should work in Node, browserify, webpack, Rollup, jspm... hell, even Unreal.js. It's just ES5, CommonJS and a few quirks like process.nextTick or require('path') (which browserify and webpack will shim).

Other modules are a bit trickier, and need to include a static asset like HTML, GLSL or another file.

In Node you might see this:

var fs = require('fs')

Hi Nicholas,

I saw you tweet about JSX yesterday. It seemed like the discussion devolved pretty quickly but I wanted to share our experience over the last year. I understand your concerns. I've made similar remarks about JSX. When we started using it Planning Center, I led the charge to write React without it. I don't imagine I'd have much to say that you haven't considered but, if it's helpful, here's a pattern that changed my opinion:

The idea that "React is the V in MVC" is disingenuous. It's a good pitch but, for many of us, it feels like in invitation to repeat our history of coupled views. In practice, React is the V and the C. Dan Abramov describes the division as Smart and Dumb Components. At our office, we call them stateless and container components (view-controllers if we're Flux). The idea is pretty simple: components can't

New ES6 Constructor Semantics and Usage Examples

Manual super: Alternative Design where subclass constructors do not automatically call superclass constructors

This Gist presents a new design of class-based object construction in ES6 that does not require use of the two-phase @@create protocol.

One of the characteristics of this proposal is that subclass constructors must explicitly super invoke their superclass's constructor if they wish to use the base class' object allocation and initialization logic.

An alternative version of this design automatically invokes the base constructor in most situations.

Ok so http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules looks more less the same as it did last time I looked, however that document combined with https://github.com/rwaldron/tc39-notes/blob/master/es6/2014-06/jun-5-modules.md#do-we-need-the-module-foo-from-foo-import-syntax looks like we're conflating quite a few concepts (IMO... not trying to anger anyone).

Personally I'm in favour for removing module as mentioned in the gist. I would also remove re-exporting (export * from "crypto"), even if it's a nicety I can't say out I've done much re-exporting in the thousands and thousands of modules I've written, does anyone else do this often? (not sure)

Single exported value

Personally (barring weird edge-cases I'm not aware of?) I would love if we only had exporting a single or multiple value, with only one syntax for importing. For example the common use-case of exporting a single function or value:

ferret.js

Understanding web components

The web components spec says there are four parts

templates
custom elements
shadow dom
html imports

disclaimer: I might be terribly wrong. This is a set of naive observations.

When you build a community you're creating a culture. That culture will be about more than the code, the modules, or the language. The people you draw in will have their own biases and behaviors that impact the kinds of people you continue to draw as you grow.

Cultures will naturally fight behavior that is divisive. That is, behavior that is divisive to the established members of that community. As a community grows larger it is harder and harder to change what the culture finds acceptable because changing it, even if it is inclusive in nature, is disturbing and divisive to existing membership. Fighting for change in established cultures means dealing with a lot of dismissive language and attacks for the "tone" of your argument.

That is why it is so important that a culture becomes comfortable with aggressively fighting exclusionary behavior. While it is certainly more beneficial to make pro-active steps to increase diversity we cannot be dismissive of the effect that passionate reactions to poor behavior

When installing Haskell Platform fails on Mac OS X (with quick fix below)

I was fighting with Haskell last weekend. At first, I couldn't install some missing libraries with Cabal, and then, when trying to find out what's wrong, I ended up removing the whole Haskell installation — only to find out I could no longer install neither the Haskell Platform nor even just Cabal Install! The warnings I would see were more or less about the use of the single quote in source code:

Preprocessing library text-0.11.2.3...

Data/Text.hs:6:52:
     warning: missing terminating ' character [-Winvalid-pp-token]

	function main(ctx) {
	ctx.toolDiameter = 1.6;
	ctx.scale(-.1, -.1);
	ctx.translate(-600, -135);

	//ctx.map('-xyz');
	// ctx.retract = 10;
	// ctx.ramping = false;
	ctx.depth= -2.5;
	ctx.depthOfCut = .1;

	module.exports = function () {
	// If there is an uncaught exception anywhre in your app, it will result in a proper 500 page.
	if (Math.random() < 0.3) throw new Error("Oops, my random is low");
	// They don't have to happen in the first tick either
	if (Math.random() < 0.2) return setTimeout(function () {
	throw new Error("Delayed random bites");
	});

	// If you throw an object, it will send a JSON document to the client
	if (Math.random() > 0.6) throw {Hello: request.url};