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Ali Abbas
Ali Abbas

Posted on • Updated on

SpaceX and Javascript🚀

Yes, its damn true.

SpaceX in its recent launch Dragon 2 Flight has used a technology based on Chromium and Javascript

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CGPA Calculator - CGPA Converter to Percentage

So Cheers to Javascript. What are your views on this ?

Top comments (35)

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gypsydave5 profile image
David Wickes

Nobody told the astronauts, right?

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sharadcodes profile image
Sharad Raj (He/Him)
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questary_stm profile image
Questary

Hope so

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

lol

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dm8typrogrammer profile image
The Mighty Programmer

It is not about JavaScript maturity; it is about design choice. Garbage Collectors based languages are not used in mission-critical tasks because they may turn non-deterministic. It is not with C and C++ because, as a programmer, you control all the aspects.

 
dm8typrogrammer profile image
The Mighty Programmer • Edited

Yes true, it is all about stronger determinism guarantees.

Also, I agree in case of garbage collected (GC) Functional Programming languages, GC can offer stronger determinism due to immutability imposed by these languages which make them realtime capable. Even in case of Java, there are some GC algorithms can offer determinism guarantees.

So in the end, any language runtime, if it can provide stronger determinism guarantees can be used for mission critical systems.

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not_jffrydsr profile image
@nobody

Brendan must be so proud his passion project broke through the stratosphere, (even if only for a UI). 🌟

I wonder why CommonLISP (or any robust LISPy code system) isn't used more ubiquitously for highly-dependable systems.

Don't know a whole ton about C or C++, just know LISP can address all their concerns plus virtually everything else in Computer Science (being based of Church's λ-Calculus) with an AST comparably faster, safer, and superiorly abstracted than C.

Am I tripping?

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damxipo profile image
Damian Cipolat

I do not think that the people of spacex are improvised if they chose this technology for something it should be and achieved a level of maturity much higher than most think. I think this opens new doors for js and the power he is coming to have.

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pinotattari profile image
Riccardo Bernardini

This sheds a very ugly light on SpaceX and their commitment to quality. I mean, managing something as risky and complex as a rocket with a web browser and a language as frail as Javascript? A language that converts everything in everything else, making equality not transitive? A language that allows this
destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat ?

No, definitively it is not acceptable, even if it controls just some minor stuff. A bug there could trigger a cascade.

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caroso1222 profile image
Carlos Roso

Yet they managed to dock into the ISS successfully. Is that unacceptable to you too? You would've coded the ui with assembler I assume.

People trash languages just for trashing them. It literally doesn't matter if you get to space with that, you won't be taken seriously. I don't find the logic in that argument.

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

Bugs speak more to the developer than the language. People bash JavaScript because they jump in without understanding it.

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dividedbynil profile image
Kane Ong

Using any language or runtime is acceptable as long as they handle the risks properly.

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

I wonder if they added an F5 button? Just in case...

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dividedbynil profile image
Kane Ong

Haha, I bet they have Ctrl+R too!

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elliot profile image
Elliot

Typescript? I hope?

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questary_stm profile image
Questary

Javascript a strong Script

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realabbas profile image
Ali Abbas

Yeah Exactly they are mature now!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I presume it was not the programming language's fault that those Boeing planes crashed tragically last year. So it won't be JavaScript's fault if things go wrong here. It's just one choice in a set of many tools to get the job done. Hopefully all necessary precautions were made and it was not used to do the things the language might be terrible at.

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