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What if JavaScript wins?

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Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#51

Post by dwc »

shiado wrote: post #19

I used to hate JS because the language is objectively badly designed, but then I realized that the merits of the language provide a glimpse of the future of programming. Most programming problems people have are highly generic, often looking to implement something completely off the shelf as far as problems go. Wheels can only be reinvented so many times in so many ways. To me the JS ecosystem offers a level of high…

> There is a package for every possible problem you have just waiting to be used.

Only if you work on the same kinds of things everyone else works on. There are certainly tons of jobs that qualify in that regard.

For other kinds of work there aren't packages that cover needed functionality, because either there wouldn't be many consumers of a package or the functionality is actually new. This is where I've found myself over the last couple of decades and I like it better, personally.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#53

Post by kizer »

kartan wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Mark my words, Web ASM will be just as opaque as traditional assembly languages. Which is to say that we'll shift the problem from "JavaScript is bad" to "I cannot debug this," "I cannot see what this script does," "I lost the original source code, and now I have to reverse engineer WASM! Help!" WASM isn't a panacea. Much like Flash, Java Applets, and ActiveX it is just the newest in a long line of Magic Blobs™ that…

> manually reviewing WASM You should not write code in WASM. You should not review WASM. In the same way that most Java developers don't have a clue how bytecode works in the JVM.

But... Java developers should have a clue how bytecode works in the JVM. Otherwise I agree.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#54

Post by themoat »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #47
kapv89 wrote: post #17

For me, as a founder of a young startup, the overarching benefit of being proficient in modern JS and sorrounding tooling is that I can use the same language for my whole stack(servers, web, Android, iOS), and spend more time thinking about the product and business. In the possible future where the company grows enough where it needs a distributed server software, the only part of the product that'd be changing would…

> the overarching benefit of being proficient in modern JS and sorrounding tooling is that I can use the same language for my whole stack...and spend more time thinking about the product and business As someone who's proficient in multiple languages, I've never had issues switching between 2 languages. Am I missing something?

If you have a couple small teams, it's nice when any one of your developers is able to work on any part of the app.

Is that worth anything? I dunno. But I can see a certain appeal to that line of thought. Similar to why a startup might do their mobile app in react native. "We have react devs, this way any of them could work on it."

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#55

Post by kapv89 »

timr wrote: post #43
kapv89 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Can you give me an exam of something that is trivial in another lang, but requires "sailing to Africa and back" in JS? 2. What sort of scalability issues related to Node.js are you talking about? Isn't node.js (thanks to V8, and async IO) much more performance friendly than other scripting langs? 3. Regarding web-stack changing quickly, this hasn't effected me on server side yet. It has effected me on the mobile a…

"Can you give me an exam of something that is trivial in another lang, but requires "sailing to Africa and back" in JS?" Packages and imports. First-class entities, built in to every other modern language. A mishmash of different "standards" and proprietary implementations in Javascript. Even K&R-era C had a better solution than Javascript (until ES6, anyway). And do not tell me that ECMAScript 6 fixes this -- as lon…

Agree with you on this one. Module systems are kind of a mess in JS land, and from the looks of it, will remain so for a few years.

However, from a purely pragmatic point of view, not a deal breaker for early stage companies.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#56

Post by anildash »

hprotagonist wrote: post #37

And somewhere, Gary Bernhardt is shaking his head in disbelief. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... was supposed to be satire... but "asm everything" might actually kind of happen.

Yeah, I definitely thought of Gary when I was writing the piece. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce!

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#57

Post by Felk »

TomK32 wrote: post #38
throwpoiu09 wrote: post #26

To put things in perspective, every decade there is an uber popular so called simple but highly inadequate non-type checked language that is taking over the world of novice developers. It's a social phenomenon. Started with Basic, JavaScript is the latest incarnation. By the same token, there is also one overcomplicated yet unavoidable professional language. In that sense, Scala these days has a proud lineage of C++…

the border between non-type and type check languages is getting diffuse these days with typescript going one way and C++ the other way http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/auto

Type deduction is very different from dynamic typing. It's still perfectly safe static typing. A better example would be C#'s "dynamic" type. I can agree with typescript though.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#58

Post by mLuby »

Felk wrote: post #39
mLuby wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. In addition, I know I can hire tons of mid-level people with JS skills and they'll be effective quickly. As much as I'd love to throw a bunch of Haskell into the codebase, the vast majority of engineers will take a while to be productive in it.

Be aware that this might be short term thinking. What you gain in getting features done fast by mid level developers will probably cost you later in the form of technical debt. I'm not saying you can't write good and maintainable software in JS, but the features and practices other languages offer (strong and static typing, interfaces or traits, ownership reinforcements, monadic entities like list comprehensions) are…

Good point, especially that last sentence.

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#59

Post by dlwdlw »

bitL wrote: post #21
kapv89 wrote: post #17

For me, as a founder of a young startup, the overarching benefit of being proficient in modern JS and sorrounding tooling is that I can use the same language for my whole stack(servers, web, Android, iOS), and spend more time thinking about the product and business. In the possible future where the company grows enough where it needs a distributed server software, the only part of the product that'd be changing would…

You literally restrict yourself to one of the worst languages ever designed. What could be solved with elegance and without demoralizing your staff in 5 minutes in some other language, in JavaScript it might require "sailing to Africa and back" to achieve the same (though I must say it has improved a bit recently from the insanity it used to be). On paper it might look good to you, but the reality is very different a…

english is similarly a terrible language in many ways. Its only benefit is it is fairly easy to learn and start speaking with in a “broken” way but still gets its point across.

Which has led to a meta advantage which is it being used everywhere.

So while Esperanto speakers bemoan this, the rest of the world doesnt care too much.

The rest is disagremeent or agreement on the quote “If it’s stupid and works, it’s not stupid”

Re: What if JavaScript wins?

#60

Post by nawgszy »

I am amused by a lot of the hyperbole used against JS, as if it somehow is hard to use or drastically restricts the problems you can solve.

At this point, I'm not even sure if a single comment in this thread that poses itself as obviously anti-JS has a valid knock on the language, just high-level, hand-wavy reasoning about why it is so poor.

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