You are reading a single comment by @Zicog and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@Zicog
Ever since the beginning of JS I had never even considered learning it. My world was "real" languages like C and C++ on embedded systems. Why on earth would I be concerned about some stupid, slow, scripting language in a browser?
Until a year or so ago then...
My boss wanted animated visualizations of a real-time data streams from our embedded systems as a Web App. "Oh crap", I know nothing of FLASH or HTML5 or JavaScript, I have not even worked on server side web technologies for ten years.
My saviours were: HTML5 with WebGL and the Three.js and IvanK libraries. Data streamed to the browser via Web Sockets. But how to feed those web sockets? Easy write a little HTTP server in Node.js. BINGO JS everywhere up and running in a few weeks learning everything from scratch.
Of course I initially thought this was all going to be a disaster, I mean, "JS is not a real language right". After being annoyed at the JS quirks I soon discovered Douglas Crockford and "JavaScript the Good Parts" and jslint and 'use strict';. I was very surprised to find out how sophisticated JS actually is what with inner functions, first class functions, closures etc. Damn thing is actually a big step up from Java in many respects!
The other big surprise is that we now have server side components rewritten in JS and running under node.js that perform almost as well as their previous C++ incarnations but are a thousand times easier to develop and maintain.
JS on those embedded systems? Yep, I already have communication centric work being done in Node.js out in the field on small ARM boards. All be it a lot less small and cheap than the Espruino.