javascrip is an amazing language- get over yourselves
HN is full of this stuff. These people don't even understand what modern JS is.
Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
171–180 of 221 posts
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
what killed Javascript for me (and I think many others) is that there is no idiomatic way of writing Javascript. There is no "javascript"-y way of doing things (unless you count callback hell). I'm not saying that a language should only offer one approach to a problem, but there should be general guardrails and guidelines. A shared vocabulary. None of that exists in modern JS
"Standard" [1] and "Airbnb" [2] seem to capture some amount of sensible guidelines. Adding Prettier [3] gets you something akin to gofmt, and adopting standard eslint rules [4] can help too. [1] https://standardjs.com/ [2] https://github.com/airbnb/javascript [3] https://prettier.io/ [4] https://eslint.org/
You're talking about style, I'm talking about idioms. Those aren't the same thing!
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many many organizations and Institutes that aren't the man. You don't have to work for a soulless corporation. You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity.
Under the current version of American Corporatism, no, you cannot work for a company that isn't soulless. A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more. Maybe you can work for a non-profit if you're lucky, but how many are there out there that pay market rate?
>A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more.
That's just the excuse the CEO's mouth pieces trot out when the company is doing stuff that is shitty and sociopathic. You'll notice the CEO has no problem getting the company to do things that enriches himself at the expense of the shareholders.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#174The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching "Great nutritious technologies to use: Make, Emacs, Lisp, CLI" "Bad unwholesome technologies to use: JavaScript, Ruby, IDEs, Graphical User Interfaces" I personally hate Make, it's burned me too many times. Now I use CMake, and I haven't been burned in years. And is it candy or an olive that I like VSCode and not Emacs (not that I've ever tried Emacs, I just don't…
I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…
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Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#175>> The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around. If you think the churn is that then you're lucky. To me, the churn is working for the man. Everything I ever do is for the man. If I could ever reach a point…
I'd say the common connotations of the word 'churn' better fit the patterns in the parent 'Advice...' article. What you're describing deserves another name, something more like 'grind' or 'yoke' or 'rat-race'.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#176Remember the last time you were supposed to fix a bug, but the code was so "bad" that you rewrote the entire application?
IMO this is why churn is not going away. It's much easier to achieve flow-state from zero than working up to it in a codebase that you're unfamiliar with.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rake, the Ruby version of Make, is rock-solid, dependable, and crazy-powerful. Don't want a Turing-complete language in your build automation? Don't use it, the rule syntax works just fine. But it's there if you want it, and oh god is it great.
> Rake, the Ruby version of Make That's a common misconception, but people often don't understand what make is. Contrary to the intuition, make is _not_ a build system (like, say, cmake), although build systems can be (and often are) implemented on top of make; nor is it a task runner (like rake). At its core, make is a declarative expert system (with a very sane design and a very quirky rule syntax). Its area of exp…
Yup, and a common modern use case of make is to call in to other language specific build systems.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have developed c++ with vim and visual studio for a couple decades. I recently made the switch to vscode from vim and i like it even better than studio. Its snappier and it integrates with my vim workflow well so i dont have to do either or.
I don't see the benefit of switch from sublime to vscode. What am I missing? Does vscode offer something different?
I'm not a sublime user, so I can't say why, but a couple of JS devs in my office switched from sublime to VS Code. I'm a little surprised by this to be honest, and I haven't interrogated them too thoroughly about why, since I'm not especially interested in either; you might want to give it a try, however.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#179“Churn” is definitely an issue. And JavaScript does have its own complexities. It feels weird singling out Ruby and JavaScript (and any other individual technologies), though. I wonder if part of this is a human instinct to “other” people who are different. Someone feels superior because they use Lisp, and looks down on people using JavaScript. Or vice versa.
I think it's less about languages and tools than the culture around those languages and tools. I think it's centered around the the answer to the question: How many customers, developers are we willing to toss to make this change? For the ruthless and stodgy Microsoft the answer was zero. For Linux close to zero.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#180Thinking you can label the churn as something it’s possible to avoid by single choice upfront about dependencies is not realistic enough to be useful. Churn is not just about the dependencies- but also about the project ... Projects which are updated often have a forcing function on them - they need to become updateable ... that can mean tests, that can mean reasonable build tools, and that can mean dropping individu…
Maleability is a very important concept, but this article is not about it.
This is not about your code not breaking while you change it. It's about things breaking when you change nothing. I've learned the lesson long ago by using PHP software, some ecosystems just break much more often than others.