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Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#81
post #80
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, a neighbor friend of my sister's came over to our house and very arrogantly announced "I live next door to a Nobel Prize winner." We all made polite comments. After she left, my mom turned to us and said "I so wanted to tell her 'my dear, I sleep with one.' Yes, it was probably the only block in the world with two Nobel Prize winners living on it.

who was your mom referring to, if I may ask?

My dad (the other Nobel Prize winner on the block)

Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#82
post #79
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the issues you listed with the language itself are fixed by using either Flow or TypeScript. As for that V8 issue, it's not ideal, but how about just putting comments of that size outside of the function, or not overcommenting functions small enough to be inlined. I know a lot of people view using so much tooling as a con of the language, but if you use Babel + Eslint + Flow/Typescript, JavaScript becomes a l…

> Most of the issues you listed with the language itself are fixed by using either Flow or TypeScript. Hence the initial comment about putting effort into fixing something fundamentally broken.

Ah true. I guess what I was really getting at was that even though JavaScript has some fundamental missteps, it's not beyond being fixed and definitely not the worst language in existence i.e. that behind the quirks, is a quite nice and powerful language that isn't a waste of effort.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#85
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Js is clearly very popular. What are these fundamental flaws that js has that this comment mentions? I don't understand why it would be the "paragon of wasted opportunity".

let's see... Lack of a real integer type ? The fact that {} + [], [] + [], [] + {} are all valid and all give different results ? [1] The fact that it has some silent error conditions like NaN ? The fact that, in v8 (which is the most common js engine out there), if you add a comment to a function, it can suddenly start performing poorly ?[0] I love JS, I really do. Hell, I write nodejs for a living ! I find prototyp…

NaN stuff works according to the IEEE 754 spec.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#86
post #56

"JavaScript Delenda Est", by zeveb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447851 Excerpt: JavaScript is the XML, the Yugo, the Therac-25 of programming languages. The sheer amount of human effort which has been expended working around its fundamental flaws instead of advancing the development of mankind is astounding. The fact that people would take this paragon of wasted opportunity and use it on the server side, w…

I'm a student trying to learn server side programming, I've started with node js. There seems to be a whole lot of modules to help with anything and with ES6 js doesn't seem so bad, and very fast (to write) as well compared to C++ that I've attempted. What are these better languages, what should one learn now for server-side when starting out?

It's fine, it really is. Just stick to what you are being productive with and enjoy actually building something useful.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#87
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments ?

Been using HN regularly for about two years now, and have just figured out two of the features from this topic: /bestcomments and /favorites?id= .

You might want to check out "Lists" link at the bottom of the page; there's a bunch of things there.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s)

#90
post #56

"JavaScript Delenda Est", by zeveb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447851 Excerpt: JavaScript is the XML, the Yugo, the Therac-25 of programming languages. The sheer amount of human effort which has been expended working around its fundamental flaws instead of advancing the development of mankind is astounding. The fact that people would take this paragon of wasted opportunity and use it on the server side, w…

I'm a student trying to learn server side programming, I've started with node js. There seems to be a whole lot of modules to help with anything and with ES6 js doesn't seem so bad, and very fast (to write) as well compared to C++ that I've attempted. What are these better languages, what should one learn now for server-side when starting out?

Keep a sticky note next to your desk and, while you're learning, make a mark every time the answer to "Why does it do that?" or "How do I do this?" has a seemingly random or counterintuitive answer.

In a year, that's the tally of how terrible or great a language is.

Bad languages don't just make bad choices, they make bad choices and then make different choices for other, similar questions that should be related.

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