Should JavaScript be split into two languages?

It’s not just better than JavaScript, I would argue it’s probably the best general purpose modern OOP based language out there right now.

It was actually really fortunate in that for a long time it didn’t have a big community behind it and they just put a lot of very smart language designers on the team where they had ten years to try various approaches and learn from the mistakes of not only themselves but others without a lot of outside noise.

But there’s no other language I would prefer to write applications in. It’s just a really nice mix of ergonomic, expressive and powerful.

I used BigInt to implement xxhash recently.

What percentage of programmers on Hacker News haven't?

Flaunting your ignorant anti-intellectualism isn't a good look.

You do know this is 2024, you have Internet access, and you can just look shit up or ask ChatGPT to learn new things, instead of cultivating ignorance and pointlessly criticising programmers trying to raise awareness, share their experiences, and educate themselves and other people.

In case you've been living under a rock and didn't realize it, JavaScript, the topic of this discussion, is essentially a dialect of Lisp, with garbage collection, first class functional closures, polymorphic JSON structures instead of s-expressions, a hell of a lot more like and inspired by Lisp and Scheme than C++, and LOTS of people know it.

PostScript is kind of like a cross between Forth and Lisp, but a lot more like Lisp actually. And its data structures, which also represent its code, are essentially s-expressions or JSON (polymorphic dicts, arrays, numbers, booleans, nulls, strings, names (interned strings), operators (internal primitives), etc.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

Not coincidentally, James Gosling designed the NeWS window system and implemented its PostScript interpreter, years before designing and implementing Java. And before that he designed and implemented "MockLisp" in his Unix version of Emacs, which he self effacingly described like: "The primary (some would say only) resemblance between Mock Lisp and any real Lisp is the general syntax of a program, which many feel is Lisp's weakest point."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954778

James Gosling's Emacs Mocklisp was like FEXPRs on PCP, with support for prompting the user to supply omitted arguments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312249

DonHopkins on May 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Emacs is sexy

Hey at least Elisp wasn't ever as bad as Mock Lisp, the extension language in Gosling (aka UniPress aka Evil Software Hoarder) Emacs.

It had ultra-dynamic lazy scoping: It would defer evaluating the function parameters until they were actually needed by the callee (((or a function it called))), at which time it would evaluate the parameters in the CALLEE's scope.

James Gosling honestly copped to how terrible a language MockLisp was in the 1981 Unix Emacs release notes:

https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_cmuGosling_4195808/Gosl

    12.2. MLisp - Mock Lisp 

    Unix Emacs contains an interpreter for a language 
    that in many respects resembles Lisp. The primary 
    (some would say only) resemblance between Mock Lisp
    and any real Lisp is the general syntax of a program, 
    which many feel is Lisp's weakest point. The 
    differences include such things as the lack of a 
    cons function and a rather peculiar method of 
    passing parameters. 

"Rather peculiar" is an understatement. More info, links and code examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727085

Comparison of PostScript with Forth and Lisp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456471

[...]

PostScript is much higher level than Forth, and a lot more like Lisp than Forth, and has much better data structures than Forth, like polymorphic arrays (that can be used as code), dictionaries (that can be used as objects), strings, floating point numbers, and NeWS "magic dictionaries" that can represent built-in objects like canvases, processes, events, fonts, etc.

Yet Forth doesn't even have dynamically allocated memory, although in a few pages of code you can implement it, but it's not standard and very few Forth libraries use it, and instead use the linear Forth dictionary memory (which is terribly limited and can't be freed without FORGETting everything defined after you allocated it):

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/alloc.f

PostScript is homoiconic. Like Lisp, PostScript code IS first class PostScript data, and you can pass functions around as first class objects and call them later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity

[...]

Sibling and parent/child traversal is still a disaster and querySelector, querySelectorAll doesn't solve it.