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Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#22

Post by topkai22 »

Nope, it’s improved a lot and approaches greatness for the reasons you mention.

It still drives ME crazy because it lets many of my colleagues produce unreadable hard to understand spaghetti code in a way I don’t see with more structured (and tool friendly) languages like C#, Java, or purer functional languages, but well written JavaScript can be a delight.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#23

Post by erikpukinskis »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #5

The functional programming community loves it, especially with the introduction of ES6.

ES6 is the worst thing that ever happened to JavaScript.

JavaScript's one best attribute was that it would run on any device. No longer true.

It's second best attribute was a simple threading model. Promises and async wrecked that.

The third best attribute was it was easy to learn. But in ES6 there are twice as many control structures to learn, with no added power. =>, class, const, etc. They just add more things to think about, without solving any problems.

Well, except that people didn't like learning closures and prototypes. And now they don't have to. So you can program in JavaScript now without learning it if you want.

And you don't have to write the word "function" and "this" a lot. So you save 2% on code size.

ES5 Forever.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#24

Post by sick_of_web_dev »

It's not as bad as PHP but yeah JavaScript or rather the community around it is largely made up of sub-par web developers (you, oh dear reader are of course the exception). Obviously you will not find as many clueless people in say embedded software development or even electrical engineering as these require a certein set of requisite skills and theory whereas every idiot can call themselves a web developer.

But yeah as long as you enjoy what you're doing, you shouldn't worry about it :)

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#25

Post by sargun »

I used to make fun of JavaScript. I hated JavaScript, it was confusing (wtf is prototype?), easy to screw up in, and didn’t have a real concurrency model.

But then I realized this didn’t matter. The JavaScript community is was evolving at a ridiculous rate. These weaknesses slowly left their blood, and honestly, now I’m left envious. I enjoy writing Flow, poking around with new ideas like async / await, and envy the sheer performance that JavaScript has attained.

I still find JavaScript and often the people associated with JavaScript to be hard to like at times, but it’s a language with great possibilities.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#26

Post by jowiar »

When someone does the denegrating you mention (and folks do), they go on my “I’ll never work with them” list. I’ve had folks do it in an interview and it’s an immediate no-hire.

JS is a tool, just like on the any other. It has some big pluses, and some annoying “WTFs”, but today, it’s a more-than-solid default answer to “What should I write my webapp in”.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#28

Post by sbilstein »

I was mostly in the Scala/Java world for a long time and laughed at the JS community’s obsession with reinventing things. Somehow I ended up using Node on every side project over the years because it was pretty easy to work with.

Fast-forward to now...I’ve decided to build my startup on typescript and node. I find the easy sharing of libraries and types across frontend and backend very liberating.

TS/ES6 are mature and run everywhere. Easy for beginners but functional enough for me. It’s taken me a while but I love JavaScript.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Be Ashamed to Love JavaScript?

#30

Post by jacob019 »

I was always a JS hater. I mostly work with python these days, but JS is required for UI development. Since I am targeting internal apps where we control the browser, I get to use the latest ES6 features without polyfills. I have to say that JS has come a long way, and some of the latest features are pretty awesome. Requests is so much more pleasant to work with that the old XMLHttpRequest, imports are great, the fat arrow has made my life so much easier, and the modern reactive frameworks are amazing. Sometimes I find myself wishing we had certain things in python, the regex syntax is more elegant and doesn't feel like a hack. And compared to Python, concurrency takes less effort. It's certainly easier to write spaghetti code in JS, but you can write bad code in any language. It's truly amazing what a flexible computing environment the modern browser has become.
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