I like javascript, but I always think about the time when I was working as a front end developer, and a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters. I believe his concern was around the lack of type safety (this was before we used Typescript). And this was someone not prone to dramatic gestures. At the time I laughed. Guy must be having a bad d…
The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
161–170 of 248 posts
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#162Earlier 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…
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#163> Less that 10 years ago, JavaScript sucked bad. It had no imports, no classes, no async, no arrow functions No classes in JS was much better than with. As someone who used and contributed to CoffeeScript, I was initially excited by them but in retrospect, they've been a huge negative IMO. Douglas Crockford saw it immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=300s
I think you experienced a different JS than I did. JS has always had classes, they were just "harder" to build/use and every "Framework" had a different mixed bag of "utilities" and patterns to work with it and they weren't always compatible. (Mixing jQuery style classes and Dojo style classes was "fun", for two random examples. I could go on all day about the long tail from MOO Tools to YUI to Backbone to…) ES2015 class syntax just standardized already common patterns and increased interoperability and cleaned up a lot of footguns regarding Prototype-style inheritance along a "garden path".
The class syntax garden path is much nicer than the weed-filled hedge maze it mostly replaced.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#164> Nobody Writes JavaScript Any More This is how "delightful" it is, and is the reason I'm waiting for it to die. Every couple of years we decide on the 'no no, definitely this time we have it all figured out, trust us, just use X' "solution" to the problem of JavaScript. We have the definative 'this is how you do it', until the next one.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#165I like javascript, but I always think about the time when I was working as a front end developer, and a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters. I believe his concern was around the lack of type safety (this was before we used Typescript). And this was someone not prone to dramatic gestures. At the time I laughed. Guy must be having a bad d…
> a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters >Guy must be having a bad day. He was having a bad day because he was doing stupid things with the code he wrote that led to problems. I've never had a problem with Javascript's type system, or having the wrong type show up where it shouldn't. I accepted the dynamic nature of JS long ago when it f…
Different languages have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as generally accepted coding practices and sometimes different paradigms. I find the folks who struggle the most are trying to write JS as if they are still a C# or Java developer so they constantly run into square peg round hole issues and blame it on the tool. I love JavaScript. I also love C#. But you've got to approach how you solve problems with them differently. How you write long term maintainable code in both is different.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about JS is that it was always terrible 5-10 years ago, and is always "actually good now". [EDIT] Though I actually agree that it's nearly-tolerable now that we have TypeScript and async/await to force what always should have been the default behavior.
Not sure what language you were coding in but I remember actively hating it 5-10 years ago and definitely didn't think "it's actually good now". It was always getting better of course, but even these days there's lots of problems that would prevent me from saying "it's actually good now". The Web APIs are pretty lacking: * WebUSB has only been available for a couple of years * WebGPU is only now becoming a thing desp…
Before long that "actually good" is lumped in with the time when it was bad... but now, of course, it's actually good!
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#167Coffeescript was well before "tree shaking" (the JS ecosystem's way of spelling "dead code removal") and code splitting, both being relatively new things in the bundler world ("tree shaking" being introduced with rollup if memory serves). Then came Acorn, which gave way to a whole slew of JS transformation bits. It also didn't help that Node was fixed at 0.12 for years and years, and we had the IO.js fork until Node…
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#168I like javascript, but I always think about the time when I was working as a front end developer, and a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters. I believe his concern was around the lack of type safety (this was before we used Typescript). And this was someone not prone to dramatic gestures. At the time I laughed. Guy must be having a bad d…
> a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters >Guy must be having a bad day. He was having a bad day because he was doing stupid things with the code he wrote that led to problems. I've never had a problem with Javascript's type system, or having the wrong type show up where it shouldn't. I accepted the dynamic nature of JS long ago when it f…
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#169I like javascript, but I always think about the time when I was working as a front end developer, and a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters. I believe his concern was around the lack of type safety (this was before we used Typescript). And this was someone not prone to dramatic gestures. At the time I laughed. Guy must be having a bad d…
I must be living in a parallel world cause I write React & TypeScript code on a daily basis (among many other things, including writing Python and SQL too), I've done it for a few years now and I quite enjoy it. Last time I had to learn a new "pattern" was Hooks I guess, and it was like 3 years ago? I was hesitant at first, I didn't have any issues with class components... but Hooks actually increased my productivity and simplified my code. Otherwise I feel like coding in React hasn't changed much over the years. I would definitely not want to go back to the technologies I was using in the 2010s.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#170> Less that 10 years ago, JavaScript sucked bad. It had no imports, no classes, no async, no arrow functions No classes in JS was much better than with. As someone who used and contributed to CoffeeScript, I was initially excited by them but in retrospect, they've been a huge negative IMO. Douglas Crockford saw it immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=300s
I'm so sick of these paradigm religious wars. There's nothing wrong with object oriented programming. There's nothing wrong with functional, either. You use them for different purposes. These people like Crockford who talk about "Java programmers are stuck in this inferior way" are the ones who are stuck and not all that educated on programming.