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Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

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Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#661

Post by renku »

scriptkiddy wrote: post #647
talyssonoc wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. The lack of understanding of JavaScript's paradigm from some people make them blind about the language power, it has the enough amount of every needed paradigm there, including OOP, functional and evented. I see in the comments here people complaining about things like dynamic `this` when they just don't understand it's one of the biggest powers of JS.

JS is not object oriented. A prototype is not the same thing as an object. There are no classes in JS.

What you mean to say: JavaScript is not class-oriented.

Sure, there are features that JavaScript lacks compared to other object-oriented languages, but saying that it's not object-oriented is like saying that it's statically typed. It's just wrong, the language is full of objects.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#662

Post by rer »

segmondy wrote: post #112
pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

Languages don't scale. Systems scale. Without said, Javascript has never really been the language for programming in the large. But make no mistake about it, it's slowly getting there as is evident by huge applications, not just web but even desktop that are being built with it. It's not impossible to refactor. The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prot…

> Languages don't scale.

Why not?

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#663

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

atoko wrote: post #565
soundwave106 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly from the programmer's perspective, it's really just one framework: .NET. I know that .NET abstracts away other frameworks such as the Win32 API, but generally you don't need to know any Win32 API etc. to make a Winforms / WPF / etc. application. With modern "web application" style development, it seems these days you need to know multiple frameworks by default, for better or for worse. More to the point, .NE…

You are confusing .Net, C# and WP* frameworks. .Net is closer to the JVM, C# is the language and WP* are libraries that interact with w32 apis

As rpeden pointed out, it's you that are confusing the things. CLR is what JVM is for C#, while all the stuff I mentioned are inside the .net framework

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#664

Post by tracker1 »

bschwindHN wrote: post #625
tracker1 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honestly, in JS/Node, I find it easiest to use a SQL adapter that can handle template strings as parameterized queries... const results = await sql.query` SELECT ... WHERE foo = ${bar} `; if (!results && results.length) return; await myQueue.add(results); Which works unbelievably well... There's not nearly as much need for boilerplate/translation layers in what is already a dynamic environment. I wrote a wrapper for…

That looks fantastic, I'll take that any day over an ORM in JS.

Here's the one I wrote for mssql[1], though it should really be updated, and probably use tedious directly, instead of mssql.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/mssql-ng

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#665

Post by mncolinlee »

pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

These complaints are all valid and serious. I believe the solutions involve writing more readable code in languages that compile down to Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

There are thousands of languages that compile down to JS. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...

There are several languages that compile to CSS, like COMPASS and SASS.

There are various document formats that freely convert to and from HTML, like Markdown and DocBook. However, HTML is probably the most readable of JS/CSS/HTML.

While you can write native JS/CSS/HTML, you're inviting unintended complexity to your project whether or not you remember sending the invitation. There's nothing wrong with that, but you should be aware which choices are best for your team and for the scope and requirements of your project.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#666

Post by flukus »

mncolinlee wrote: post #665
pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

These complaints are all valid and serious. I believe the solutions involve writing more readable code in languages that compile down to Javascript, CSS, and HTML. There are thousands of languages that compile down to JS. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu... There are several languages that compile to CSS, like COMPASS and SASS. There are various document formats that freely convert to and…

Those are incredibly leaky abstractions. You have to know the language, you have to know javascript (for debugging) and in many cases you have to know exactly how the language is transpiled into javascript.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#667

Post by BinaryIdiot »

nathan_long wrote: post #644
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is a fantastic language. I don't get this animosity towards it. A decade ago it was made fun of by people who "use real programming languages" but JavaScript has grown up. It's actually very good and very fast. ES6 brought improvements but honestly ES5 is still a great language.

JavaScript is not a fantastic language. It does a lot of things that make no sense. It converts between types in nonsensical ways. Eg in Ruby, you can't accidentally do `5 + "hi"` and get "5hi". If you really want to treat the number as a string, you can do `5.to_s + "hi"` and it works, but you don't do such crap accidentally. In JavaScript, `4 / "cake"` returns `NaN`, which is sensible, but if I wanted to check whet…

> It does a lot of things that make no sense. It converts between types in nonsensical ways. Eg in Ruby, you can't accidentally do `5 + "hi"` and get "5hi". If you really want to treat the number as a string, you can do `5.to_s + "hi"` and it works, but you don't do such crap accidentally.

Uh, so two things here. First, even though it's a dynamic language you should know what your code is doing. Your code should never be be "accidentally" doing this. That would be very poor design outside of an accidental bug.

Second, some other dynamic languages do this or other weird type coercion (I mean type coercion exists for a reason; sounds like you're against it in general which is separate from JavaScript). PHP simply extracts numbers from strings and uses them in this case. Many languages use + as a concatenation operator JavaScript just doesn't have a good way to override it so it could work properly in all cases.

> In JavaScript, `4 / "cake"` returns `NaN`, which is sensible, but if I wanted to check whether I just accidentally did a bad division, `(4 / "cake") === NaN` will lie to me.

It's not lying to you; you're using a feature of the language wrong. That's like calling the wrong validation function and getting upset because it's not working like you wanted it to (because there is a validation function for NaN). At the same time a good design won't run into this issue anyway. Now I'll admit NaN is a bit of an oddball so yes it's not the most intuitive but at the same time don't say the language is lying to you.

> There are LOTS of quirks like this. JS is like a floor with boards missing all over the place. Yes, if you've walked on it every day for years, you've already stepped in every hole and know where they are. But that doesn't make it a good floor.

> A good language is consistent. JS is not.

Not really. This is the common statement repeated by those who don't use JavaScript and consider it an awful language. If you're following best practices I'd love to know where all these language quirks or inconsistencies are because I'm for sure not running into them.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#668

Post by aredherring »

astrodust wrote: post #152
jorblumesea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well supported is ES6 across browsers? Chrome for sure. Not sure about FF or IE.

You can transpile to ES5 if you've got compatibility issues. Not really a problem.

Transpiling usually concerns syntax. Babel won't transpile .endsWith to a polyfill for you, hence the existence of that package

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#669

Post by aredherring »

ionised wrote: post #474

As primarily a back-end developer I am being exposed to some front-end work at the moment with AngularJS/CoffeeScript. I have to agree with you. I'm not enjoying it at all.

I feel for you. You're being exposed to a framework that is a mess in one of the [most hated languages of 2016][0]

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#670

Post by ionised »

aredherring wrote: post #669
ionised wrote: post #474

As primarily a back-end developer I am being exposed to some front-end work at the moment with AngularJS/CoffeeScript. I have to agree with you. I'm not enjoying it at all.

I feel for you. You're being exposed to a framework that is a mess in one of the [most hated languages of 2016][0] [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

The most popular back-end language being Javascript makes me sad.
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