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The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

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Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#201

Post by PointyFluff »

8note wrote: post #156
yamtaddle wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

The thing about JavaScript is lots of people are touching it and are innovating both in how to use it, and for language features. It's always getting better, and always has opportunities to get better

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Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#202

Post by rafark »

danielvaughn wrote: post #35
ghusto wrote: post #14

> 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.

I don't know enough about WASM to know why it can't be exposed directly to the DOM, since in theory the DOM should be a language-agnostic interface. If that were to happen, I think the floodgates would really open on WASM and we'd finally start to see JS die.

Exactly what I thought a few months ago.

The DOM and the HTTP api (or pretty much all browser APIs for that matter) should be interfaces that can be implemented in WASM code. I have no idea why this hasn’t been proposed let alone implemented. I mean, why give us the ability to use other languages if we can’t implement the (browser) APIs?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#203

Post by PointyFluff »

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.

[dead]

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#204

Post by overgard »

leptons wrote: post #162
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…

Sorry, but var is absolutely still a thing. It has plenty of valid use cases and sometimes using let just needlessly complicates the code.

I'm curious, what use case? I can honestly say I don't think I've used var once in the last 5 years but maybe my coding style is different. Where is var useful?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#205

Post by overgard »

potta_coffee wrote: post #118
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

You're not the only one. I'm sure Typescript is nice / better, but I don't feel like having yet another bullshit language foisted on me. Also I dislike Microsoft.

I'd barely call it a new language, it's just javascript where you actually document the allowed structure of your data.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#206

Post by overgard »

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.

C++ is this generations C++, it hasn't gone anywhere (especially with WebAssembly). JS isn't even a tenth of the insane complexity of C++ (I say as a fan of C++ and JS)

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#207

Post by amateurCoder5 »

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 modern JS. But Crockford's new book "How JavaScript Works" is basically the updated version. As an amateur coder I found it very useful, definitely worth reading.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#208

Post by bigger_cheese »

karaterobot wrote: post #135

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…

My experience with javascript as a non-software developer/non web person has often involved frustration.

A good example is an experience I had a few years ago (circa 2018)

My work acquired some new software which published some results using a REST endpoint. I wanted to pass some parameters to the endpoint get a response and display the response on a webpage.

I'm used to working with Python/R and SQL databases it is relatively easy to write code in these languages to execute a SQL query and publish the result.

To do the same thing with endpoint I had to learn about ajax, asynchronous code, callbacks and then later deferred promises. What I thought would be relatively simple ended up being horrendously complicated to code.

I think part of the problem is the javascript language changes and adds new features so rapidly it is very hard to search google for help in my case I found code examples using callbacks, I had massive issues trying to make it work only to later discover that was old way to do it and the new way was to use Promises instead. Most of google searches I made went to horrendously outdated stackoverflow posts and there was no obvious way to tell if answer was best practice or not.

Doing the same google search again today in 2023 it looks like they have reinvented how to do it with something called "Await" now.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#209

Post by stevefan1999 »

junon wrote: post #7

Coffeescript 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…

Joyent. Loved their free cloud server plans before until it was accquired by Samsung. It was also at that time I started looking at NodeJS, which is one of the side project from their software engineer for their SmartOS based on Solaris amirite?

But anyhow, boy oh boy, look at what we have today.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#210

Post by crubier »

rafark wrote: post #202
danielvaughn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know enough about WASM to know why it can't be exposed directly to the DOM, since in theory the DOM should be a language-agnostic interface. If that were to happen, I think the floodgates would really open on WASM and we'd finally start to see JS die.

Exactly what I thought a few months ago. The DOM and the HTTP api (or pretty much all browser APIs for that matter) should be interfaces that can be implemented in WASM code. I have no idea why this hasn’t been proposed let alone implemented. I mean, why give us the ability to use other languages if we can’t implement the (browser) APIs?

If having access to all browsers API had been a prerequisite to getting WASM on the browser, we’d still be decades away from having that, and we’d still be debating what the APIs should like in WASM. I’m grateful that people went for the pragmatic approach.
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