Ask HN: Changing my mind about JavaScript

Type safety is important but 80% of the infra is built on bash :rolleyes:

There is honestly not much to learn, and that might be part of the appeal. At its core, JS is a relatively simple dynamic language with a clean syntax. Despite the clean syntax there are quite a few quirks in how some of the internals work (sorting and pervasive string comparison and casting, equality operator, etc). The most interesting thing about it is probably the programming model of free-form objects and closures: rather than using classes, you could write functions that return free-form records containing functions (and getters) that close over the lexical scope of the function. This gives a kind of dynamic object construction flexibility without the additional boilerplate.

For the base language I recommend Dr. Axel Rauschmayer's books (https://exploringjs.com/) as they're kept very much up to date.

Where things get really interesting is TypeScript, which takes all of this dynamism and manages to model it with a type system that doesn't feel all that constraining. It also ameliorates most of the core language papercuts. I don't really have good recommendations for TypeScript for now, other than browsing typescript issues and pull requests for examples written by Anders Hejlsberg

You have to be very careful with the library and tooling ecosystem, however. There are a billion ways to do things, many of them incompatible with each other, and things break all the time. This includes major, popular libraries and frameworks with good looking documentation websites, so it can be difficult to pick something solid and stable. This is where most of the pain of using JS comes from.

I have started with a dynamic language with optional typing (BASIC), back in 1986, went through several static and dynamic typing throughout the years.

While I lean on the static languages front, I am a big fan of dynamic languages as well, like Smalltalk and anything Lisp.

In regards to JavaScript, it isn't the Scheme/SELF we wanted, it is what we got and already quite powerful.

Some advanced stuff, how prototype inheritance works, how the new class model is actually mostly syntax sugar on top of prototype inheritance and not really Java like even if it looks similar, how decorators work (not yet fully there but will come), JIT and GC across the various runtimes, if care about server code how to write native extensions for the various runtimes.

JavaScript is one of my favorite languages. It has the nearly unique design constraints of having multiple implementations and being unwilling to break backwards compatibility, which gives it a lot of warts that are easy to ridicule. But I think the language on the whole is very flexible, very simple, and very usable.

I would recommend getting your head around closures. It’s possible to statically determine what variables exist in which scope, and so if you can nail down those rules it makes analyzing code much easier.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Clos...

I would recommend a light linter. I see too much new JavaScript code using `var` written by non-JS devs in 2024.

But I don’t think you need TypeScript if you’re first learning the language. Instead, revel in the dynamically-typed flexibility, and learn the error messages JS gives. There are only really 4 or 5 things that will cause JS to error, which can make debugging difficult initially, but once you learn those error messages, it makes debugging comparatively easy.

JS isn’t any more or less broken than every other language under the sun