Atwood’s Law was proposed by Jeff Atwood in 2007: “any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.”
Disclaimer: This article is neither a promotional piece for Atwood’s Law nor a glorification of JavaScript, but rather aims to inform everyone that browsers can do much more.
If you do not know who Jeff Atwood is, that’s not important; what matters is this law.
KK believes that in the future, we are focused on the Screen - various screens: PCs, mobile phones, tablets, in-car TVs, televisions, etc. When the concept of Screen was first brought up, probably not many people fully understood it, but now, as we look around, how much information you receive is not from a screen?
Back to the main topic, looking at Atwood's Law, simply put, any application that can be implemented using JavaScript will eventually be implemented in JavaScript, which seems a bit redundant. The main runtime environment for JavaScript is the browser (excluding node.js, mongodb functions, etc.), so today let’s talk about whether (almost) everything can be accomplished through a browser.
Let’s see what browsers can do now:
Web Apps: With the explosion of mobile internet, various apps have overwhelmed the market; simultaneously, another focal point has continued to attract countless eyes: HTML5. This raises a topic “the death of mobile apps, the rise of web apps.” As HTML5 standards advance, more JavaScript APIs can be applied to apps, and it’s only natural that this topic comes up; as for who causes the death of whom, that remains to be verified.
Applications rewritten in JavaScript: As an Emacs fan programmer, perhaps you have configured various plugins to tailor it into a handy IDE. When I saw an online Emacs that appeared in 2004 and was hosted on GitHub, I was already unsettled. Including the later more realistic YMacs.
There are many such examples, online mind mapping, online flowcharts, prototyping, Gantt charts, project management etc. Do you still need local apps? Anyway, I have moved everything online.
More and more online IDE tools: Cloud9 IDE, Koding, codeanywhere, and so on. They can host code using GitHub and deploy via Heroku (or maybe GAE), and more and more tasks can be completed without being local, hence many foreign programmers can boast: “My work environment only needs an iPad.”
Online office: Google Drive, Skydrive, CRM, financial management, invoice management, and many more. I don’t have any office tools on my machine, completely relying on Google Docs to process text and spreadsheets.
Hundreds and thousands of JavaScript development frameworks/tools: JQuery, Sentan, Dojo, Prototype, Yahoo’s YUI, and Batman (hoho, familiar?), Google’s Closure, and so on. There are over 1000 records of JQuery plugins listed on OSChina. With the help of PhoneGap and similar frameworks promoting web apps to mobile, OMG, you should understand Atwood’s Law better.
One piece of news: The Kickstarter project for JavaScript Git reached its funding goal in just 28 hours, and Git was not spared, so who’s next? An operating system? Don’t joke, operating systems were the first to fall, don’t you remember webOS? Apart from being bought by HP and renamed webOS, there are also browser-based yuanOS, and webQQ has already turned into a web OS.
Image processing is not an issue anymore; Tencent’s frontend team launched AlloyImage. Do you think online Photoshop is still far off?
So much talk, so is this law applicable? Please verify this together.
Original text: Atwood's Law: "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."
