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Interview with Douglas Crockford

evrone.com

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Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#31

Post by the_other »

koromak wrote: post #18
peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

ES6 is what makes JS bearable to write modern day. Totally don't understand his point here. Who wants endless nested promise chains?

> Who wants endless nested promise chains?

One of the things Promises solves is nesting. If you're nesting them, you're doing it wrong.

(I don't mean "never nest them"... but if you find you're nesting them, see if you can refactor to "all()" them or similar)

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#33

Post by [deleted] »

fio_ini wrote: post #30

God douglas crockford is such a cool guy. Douglas Crockford invented the internet, distributed systems, JSON, dec64, Javascript, E, for loops, and mathematics. Obviously whatever he says goes. When he speaks in an interview a link appears. But in all serious it is time to move away from Javascript. Pretty much every professional javascript developer I worked with in my career doesn't even understand browser Javascrip…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#34

Post by tomgp »

saiojd wrote: post #23
peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

I've always felt there's a disconnect between two groups of people, those who use a language in their day-to-day work and those who approach it more as an object of study (i.e. academics or hobbyists). The latter view bloat as a bad thing, while it's not the biggest concern for the former (who have more pressing problems!). So for Crockford an expanding language definition is catastrophic, but for people writing web…

my feeling was that Crockford’s ‘…good parts’ was intensely pragmatic. About as far away from the academic approach you’re describing as i can imagine. A bigger, multi paradigm language makes it harder to read other peoples code as the chances are higher that they’re employing a different paradigm or alter a different idiom, a clear maintenance burden.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#35

Post by eyelidlessness »

tejohnso wrote: post #11

Interesting. I had no idea he had transitioned from promoting Javascript's good parts to calling for its retirement. I started to get a bad feeling when the class keyword became popular, but all of the old good parts are still there.

I vastly prefer functional programming to OOP. But I find my use of `class` in JS increasing for two reasons orthogonal to the paradigm distinction:

1. Particularly in pure JS projects which either haven’t yet or won’t migrate to TypeScript, classes are an excellent way to define data types. They needn’t be stateful, they can be used just like POJOs in otherwise pure functional code. But their shape is clear (or can/should be), and can be used as both types and runtime references without a lot of ceremony.

2. Classes, when they have a clear shape, are great for performance-sensitive code. POJOs can achieve this, but it’s frequently all too easy for their shape to evolve as a codebase is in maintenance. And that can cause hard to find performance regressions.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#36

Post by jillesvangurp »

peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

"The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it."

I think that's a pretty interesting statement from somebody like Douglas Crockford. Not disagreeing; but still ...

I think there are two ways of looking at recent changes in Javascript. Either it's progress or it's just not enough progress. I think what he is saying here is that there it has too much baggage and that there are newer and more interesting languages now. That's not such a strange thing to say for somebody that has been involved with trying to create new languages.

My personal view is that browser Javascript is mostly a compilation target these days, including for Javascript itself, and that we now have a better compilation target in the form of WASM that is less awkward to target for a lot of languages as well. The question is what languages people will be using in the next years that target that. I'd say there are some interesting alternatives to choose from already and there are likely to be more in the next few years.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#37

Post by zdragnar »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #35
tejohnso wrote: post #11

Interesting. I had no idea he had transitioned from promoting Javascript's good parts to calling for its retirement. I started to get a bad feeling when the class keyword became popular, but all of the old good parts are still there.

I vastly prefer functional programming to OOP. But I find my use of `class` in JS increasing for two reasons orthogonal to the paradigm distinction: 1. Particularly in pure JS projects which either haven’t yet or won’t migrate to TypeScript, classes are an excellent way to define data types . They needn’t be stateful, they can be used just like POJOs in otherwise pure functional code. But their shape is clear (or can…

Using runtime classes can also be handy if you're willing to use `instanceof` (or the speedier constructor comparison) to disambiguate between types, such as when you want to branch on Left/Right in an Either, or None/Just in a Maybe, or Error/Success in a Result, etc.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#38

Post by LordN00b »

capableweb wrote: post #25
saiojd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always felt there's a disconnect between two groups of people, those who use a language in their day-to-day work and those who approach it more as an object of study (i.e. academics or hobbyists). The latter view bloat as a bad thing, while it's not the biggest concern for the former (who have more pressing problems!). So for Crockford an expanding language definition is catastrophic, but for people writing web…

I'm not a academic nor hobbyist but work professionally with JavaScript for more than 10 years. I'm also "against" the constant syntactic sugar that gets added with little to no benefits, just leading to JavaScript having a large syntax. Why introduce "classes" which are just sugar on top of existing syntax? Many examples just like this, where sometimes it feels like JavaScript has changes just to have changes. Altho…

To take your argument to the extreme, why have for loops, when then are syntatic sugar over while loops? I'm generally a fan of syntatic sugar in a language if it's purpose is to simplify what's already there; but it is a balance between developer productivity and ease-of-use. I once saw javscript described as 'pithy', becuase of it's small syntatical footprint, that's probably not true so much now.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#40

Post by jacobsenscott »

bitwize wrote: post #21
binkHN wrote: post #10

I thought this part was rather interesting: > Evrone: You spread the idea that developers should read each other's code regularly… > Douglas: In filmmaking, there is a time in the morning called "dailies", when the previous day's footage is examined. It looks like everyone is just sitting around watching movies and wasting time, but it is critically important in finding problems early and assuring the quality of the…

Plus there's the fact that film casts and crews have a work day that's quite a bit longer than a programmer's typical work day. We have already enough problems with crunch; do we want to make 10-12 hour workdays the norm? Because that's what will happen if you want to maintain current development velocity.

Finding problems earlier increases velocity, so I would expect the opposite. If people are spending all 8 hours coding it is unlikely they are producing good code.
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