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The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

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Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#141

Post by yCombLinks »

hot_gril wrote: post #103
Wazako wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

typing saves so much time. Especially since the flexibility of its optionality does not restrict, and allows for really nice autocompletions. Especially with esbuild which has made this simple and fast, one could even say it has saved javascript.

Typing wastes time. Teammate and I tried switching a backend project to TS, and I kept a mental note of time spent defining types vs time saved not debugging type-related issues. The result was some high number vs 0. Also messed with the toolchain, making things like Node profiling not work.

If you already have an existing, functioning codebase, adding types is not saving you time (right now). It's akin to adding a lot of unit tests. You gain time later, and often indirectly from others not making mistakes your types would prevent.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#142

Post by capableweb »

okeuro49 wrote: post #128
suzzer99 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just described how I feel about Typescript - created by Java programmers so that they can feel comfortable and not have to learn how to program in Javascript. I was a Java dev for a decade. It's so much more tedious and less fun than programming in Javascript. I get Java recruiting emails and I shudder. I accept that in gigantic apps worked on by multiple teams, and libraries shared with 3rd parties, Typescript…

> created by Java programmers so that they can feel comfortable and not have to learn how to program in Javascript. Well... C# .Net developers, as Microsoft found, correctly, that you can't build complex products easily with a lack of types. I also don't think many program in vanilla Javascript; it seems everyone is using JSX.

Are you really trying to say people couldn't build complex apps before TypeScript? I know of hundreds of examples that were made before TS...

Complex apps still had lots of tests, which basically solve the same problem as TS is trying to address, without having to write a different language than what gets run by the browsers.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#143

Post by capableweb »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #80
miohtama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surprise surprise, class syntax is basically just syntactic sugar on top of prototypes, and they essentially work the same way, besides bring able to have private members (which seems like a anti-pattern anyways).

You'll able to accomplish exactly the same with both, so why create yet another way? Seems bit wasteful..

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#144

Post by capableweb »

Wazako wrote: post #51
pier25 wrote: post #44

I must be the only person left not writing TS at this point. Once EcmaScript adopts optional static types or some kind of standardized type annotations [1] I will probably use those. At least in Node, where I have more control of the runtime version. [1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

typing saves so much time. Especially since the flexibility of its optionality does not restrict, and allows for really nice autocompletions. Especially with esbuild which has made this simple and fast, one could even say it has saved javascript.

Believe it or not, autocomplete is still possible without typing, as any user of any dynamic language could tell you. Seems like a poor reason to add a another full language to the abstraction ladder of your application.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#145

Post by hot_gril »

yCombLinks wrote: post #141
hot_gril wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing wastes time. Teammate and I tried switching a backend project to TS, and I kept a mental note of time spent defining types vs time saved not debugging type-related issues. The result was some high number vs 0. Also messed with the toolchain, making things like Node profiling not work.

If you already have an existing, functioning codebase, adding types is not saving you time (right now). It's akin to adding a lot of unit tests. You gain time later, and often indirectly from others not making mistakes your types would prevent.

Ample time passed, we added more after we were already on TS, and it wasn't helping. In fact it was a constant burden on new code.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#146

Post by boucher »

I think there's a small but growing group of people in the JS ecosystem that are beginning to explore a more "platform native" approach to front-end development, which removes the need for bundlers and transpilers and embraces the fairly capable feature set of most modern browsers.

As the OP points out, a lot of what happens now is an artifact of the history of how these things have developed, and about which things were prioritized over the years. Many of these choices made sense at the time but may no longer be necessary, and some things were definitely lost in the process.

When we were developing Cappuccino, which includes its own transpiled to JS language (possibly the first such general purpose language), one of our important goals was making sure the compiler could run in the browser itself so no external build tools were needed; everything worked just dragging index.html in the browser and writing code in tags if you wanted. Security changes in how browsers handle file: URLs made this harder to do, but anything that simplifies the process of actually running code is very welcome.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#147

Post by rikroots »

okeuro49 wrote: post #128
suzzer99 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just described how I feel about Typescript - created by Java programmers so that they can feel comfortable and not have to learn how to program in Javascript. I was a Java dev for a decade. It's so much more tedious and less fun than programming in Javascript. I get Java recruiting emails and I shudder. I accept that in gigantic apps worked on by multiple teams, and libraries shared with 3rd parties, Typescript…

> created by Java programmers so that they can feel comfortable and not have to learn how to program in Javascript. Well... C# .Net developers, as Microsoft found, correctly, that you can't build complex products easily with a lack of types. I also don't think many program in vanilla Javascript; it seems everyone is using JSX.

> I also don't think many program in vanilla Javascript

I enjoy coding in vanilla JS - my canvas library is 100% vJS, with a hand-written .d.ts file in the root directory in case anyone wants to import it into their TS project.

That said, I also enjoy jogging along cliff edges and sheltering under trees during storms so I'm not the sort of person who should be offering programming advice...

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#148

Post by ElectricalUnion »

techaqua wrote: post #78
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?

Kinda, as usual within Javaland, there's a lot of reflection involved into making annotated interfaces (a kinda of standard Java reasonably limited dsl capabilities) pop up as singletrons connecting to your database/OLAP/LDAP/REST-endpoints/websocket-clients/whatever.

Same thing for serialization things, you define interfaces, the actual classes often just pop into existence by generated bytecode.

It's also not unknown to bring JSP/EL (literally requires a Java Compiler embedded in your server to compile servlet objects for you on the fly) or some other, on purpose less fully featured template things with their own DSLs like Thymeleaf to do the same job.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#149

Post by pcthrowaway »

capableweb wrote: post #143
pcthrowaway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surprise surprise, class syntax is basically just syntactic sugar on top of prototypes, and they essentially work the same way, besides bring able to have private members (which seems like a anti-pattern anyways). You'll able to accomplish exactly the same with both, so why create yet another way? Seems bit wasteful..

You could always create private members with closures.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#150

Post by WorldMaker »

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…

I think Firefox's debugger is still extremely viable for web development. The Firefox Developer Edition even puts the Dev Tools nicely at hand in the toolbar and other places.

It can't help enough with Node or Hermes, but those are too tied to v8 and thus Chromium internals to start with. (Which definitely leaves some questions about the current JS monoculture.)

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