Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 248 posts

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#71

Post by throw_m239339 »

weeksie wrote: post #6

Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it. Nothing wrong with being C++. The reason JS is so massive and weird is because it's the language that everybody uses, or has to use at some point. Upsides and downsides.

> Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it.

No, it's not massive compared to C++, it's actually quite simple. No explicit pointer management, no memory management, no user defined operator overloading and so on and so forth. The only difference between classes and function prototypes AFAIK is "super" late binding, otherwise one can replace classes with functions everywhere they want.

The problem isn't javascript itself, it's the different runtimes that have different API. But the javascript spec is tiny compared to C++.

As for the ecosystem, it's mostly node's that is a mess, as the result of core Node API being barebone. Browser API are actually quite extensive and do a lot of stuff, from shaders to XML parsing to sound generation, but this isn't javascript it's the DOM/Browser API.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#72

Post by sodapopcan »

reidjs wrote: post #48
artyom wrote: post #46

I moved away from JavaScript because of the same reason I moved away from PHP. An originally decent idea gone terribly wrong.

How do you build web applications?

There are plenty of ways these days to build rich web applications without writing much JS. LiveView, Hotwire, Reactor, LiveWire, Blazor...

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#73

Post by riceart »

josephg wrote: post #50
tln wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about JS the language, or the ecosystem? JS as a language isn't nearly as big as C++ or, say, Swift... I'd say Python complexity is on par or even higher than JS, in terms of core language features. There are some language features that are outdated but it's hardly like the C++ situation.

There are far more ways to write javascript than any of us want. For objects with methods you can make literals, use a constructor with new and have prototype methods, use a class, or use Object.extend, or Object.create or probably other tricks. For async code we have callbacks or promises. And promises can just use the Promise class and .then(), or you can use async / await. And the promise class also has polyfills…

There’s a 300 page book out there on on just initializers in C++.

> There are far more ways to write javascript than any of us want.

Some of the examples you cite are due to JavaScript being minimalist though. For object creation there are a few different syntactic methods but it is straightforward how they compare semantically - they are basically equivalent. C++ has numerous methods to do similar things but they each have their own numerous rules and exceptions. Ironically in C++ there is often only one way to do something a certain way, as a similar syntax for initialization may (not will) do something completely different depending on external context - such as merely putting parens around a set of braces.

The diagnostic output of the compilers alone when you misplace a symbol is longer than many JavaScript libraries.

> But it’s big enough that almost nobody knows every javascript feature.

I don’t think this is true. It just isn’t that big of a language. The examples given certainly don’t paint a picture of immense complexity - a few things have accreted during the years, it’s not outside of simply just learning them in a few weeks.

It’s not just about the length of the spec (which is much shorter) but the complexity of those specified features within the system as a whole - JS as a system just isn’t relatively that complex.

> the language probably still isn’t as big as C++.

For anybody that does modern C++ and JavaScript professionally (as opposed to those that are content continuing to write C++ like it’s CFront) this is a coffee spitting understatement.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#74

Post by qazxcvbnm »

ntonozzi wrote: post #67
qazxcvbnm wrote: post #47

Many other comments have touched upon other unusual aspects of the Javascript ecosystem, but there's another major aspect in the ecosystem at quite a precarious position, yet of which, I see very little discussion on, namely, the debugger. Chrome DevTools is the de facto debugger of Javascript, which becomes apparent once I have to take advantage of Javascript's capability of moving beyond the browser, on alternate r…

WebStorm and VSCode both have OK debuggers, but in my experience they are even more finicky than the Chrome one, which as you noted does have issues. Firefox and Safari are likewise fine, but not as good as Chrome. More importantly though, if you are that distrustful of Chrome, you probably should not be using Node because it is based on v8, the Chrome Javascript runtime.

There are basic things to be desired with the current state of affairs, beyond the trust of Google, such as:

1) ability to debug locally, without an Internet connection.

2) ability to debug reliably, without fear of debugger features becoming 'updated' when one needs it most.

The fact that no independent debugger, without the Leviathan that is Chrome, exists, only hides this aspect even more, hardly doing justice to the importance of debugging in the practice of software.

Regards to the Firefox and Safari debuggers, they do not seem to be viable in practice with the alternative Javascript runtimes mentioned, both very popular and widely used, which is the reason that I claim Chrome DevTools to be the de facto 'Javascript debugger'. Neither do the two tools offer a debugger independent of the browser, as far as I am aware.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#75

Post by jakelazaroff »

treis wrote: post #45
qbasic_forever wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS itself is perfectly fine and quite a nice language when you stick to all its modern idioms that you learned and use today. I think what rankles a lot of people is going through the history of JS when it was terrible and confusing, then basically just jQuery, then the explosion and confusion of server side/node and drama with the company behind it, and finally confusion and drama with moving to modern ES modules. F…

The problem with JS these days is not that what's there is bad. It's that there's not much there. Anything beyond the basics requires you to roll your own or go hunt for a library.

As in, there's not much in the standard library? What other options are there beyond "roll your own" or "use a library"?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#76

Post by harha_ »

I can't help but cringe when looking at the dependency count when using some javascript framework to write client-side code. I think the frameworks and the ecosystem is overly complex and the same could be accomplished by embracing minimalism. I do like things such as babel and webpack though, but those are dev-dependencies which is unrelated to the contents of the final bundle and I can live with few dev dependencies.

For my last project I wrote just plain old javascript without any frameworks, but I did use dev dependencies such as the ones I mentioned above. It was a breeze to implement things, but I do understand that the benefits of frameworks like React become clear in larger more complex projects. So all in all I don't really know what should I think about the current state of the ecosystem, nor am I really on the edge of the wave of progress, but the kind of feelings I often get is in the lines of 'is this dependency x really needed here? what does it do? oh it does this small little thing, why is it here??'...

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#78

Post by techaqua »

jsdeveloper wrote: post #43

So what was weird exactly? react is not JS. nextjs is not js..... same way spring boot is not java. JS is the way it is. Most of it complainants has issues as they usually come from synchronose language and when JS (its true power) uses its async nature, they can't comprehend it and think its weird, why would it do so. If your rational is that its slow, you should probably use assembly to write the most optimal code.…

> nextjs is not js..... same way spring boot is not java

does spring boot bring it's own dsl and compiler?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#79

Post by ilyt »

weeksie wrote: post #6

Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it. Nothing wrong with being C++. The reason JS is so massive and weird is because it's the language that everybody uses, or has to use at some point. Upsides and downsides.

JS is far smaller language than C++. You don't need to agree on common part of language, it's the rest of the ecosystem around that's the problem as you "need" a lot just to fix JS deficiencies

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#80

Post by pcthrowaway »

miohtama wrote: post #27
weeksie wrote: post #6

Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it. Nothing wrong with being C++. The reason JS is so massive and weird is because it's the language that everybody uses, or has to use at some point. Upsides and downsides.

JavaScript, The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford symbolises this well today https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/621qrt/jav...

Javascript, The Good Parts, is not really relevant to today's Javascript, unless it's been refreshed. I remember working through it 10+ years ago:

* `var` is no longer a thing.

* Even `let` is less common now.

* Using closures and prototypes to enable functions to be used like classes and have private variables and static variables, have been replaced with proper classes

Nowadays if you want to use the good parts of Javascript, just install eslint with insane defaults and let it tell you if you're trying to use the non-good parts

Post reply on HN