331–340 of 479 posts
Dislike ActionScript - Like JavaScript. Interesting ...
I love how we boil things down to be black and white. You either love a language, or you hate it. Unfortunately, nothing is ever that easy; just (try to) use the right tool for the job.
What is it about CoffeeScript that people don't like?
Becoming expert in a new language goes beyond learning syntax; one must also learn code conventions/style, compiler/transpiler quirks, runtime quirks, and library/framework ecosystem. In CoffeeScript the last two may be moot, but the first two remain. Additionally, to be an expert in a transpiled language, one must be an expert in the target language. It is much harder to find someone that has this knowledge and experience in both CoffeeScript and JavaScript.
This begs the question of each web dev team: if you are already experts in JavaScript, is the value-add from the transpiled language worth the cost of increased solution complexity/cognitive load, and smaller talent pool? My take is that CoffeeScript doesn't meet that bar for most teams.
For individual projects, or isolated one-off tools, these non-technical issues are moot. Also, server-side may be less of an issue since complexity is reduced by not having to write for multiple runtimes (only Node.js and usually without DOM).
Curious about all the Go dislikes. From the kind of things that get posted here I'd have assumed it to be almost universally liked. Anybody can provide reasons?
I think the popularity comes from a number of googlers using HN and upvoting related stories. A lot of go fans seem to be people for whom it's their second language after python (or possibly their fourth language after python, java and c++ - the only languages that google employees are allowed to use, AIUI). So they see a language that's more expressive than java, less crazy than C++, safer and more performant than python, and think it's the best thing since sliced bread.
There are some good things in go. An opinionated formatter that ships with the language is a great idea. Static duck typing is an interesting idea, though IMO less useful than either alternative - it means you can't do the equivalent of newtype, which is something you use all the time when coding in a properly typesafe language because it lets you catch so many errors. If you look at the scala community, there's a syntax for doing this... and almost everyone's agreed it's a bad idea. The concurrency model is... worth pursuit and I'm glad someone's trying it, though ultimately I think it will prove less practical than e.g. Erlang-style approaches.
It's not the worst language ever. But it utterly fails to live up to the hype. I've yet to find anyone who likes it having previously done a serious project in Haskell/Scala/F#/OCaml.
Let's just write our web apps in C or Haskell since everyone likes those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
also without an ORM do you just hand roll all your object graphs? I'm picturing a sea of builders and factories which amount to a hand rolled ORM anyway. Or are you practicing stringly typed programming? Ultimately in any strongly typed language you're either going to make/use some kind of mapper or else abandon typing and use maps/dicts which raises the question of why you're using a strongly typed language in the f…
First, you can have strongly typed languages that aren't object oriented. Instead of using maps/dics, you could use records. The thing I don't like about ORMs as they are typically handled is that you map objects to tables up front, and those are the things you can query for. Using something like Linq, you can more easily treat your database as relational, and still return strongly typed objects. These objects can be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All programming languages claim to be better than that "Other" language!
Not all. Lisp doesn't claim to be better (it is often argued that it's worse). But what Lisp does right, it's meta programming, therefore letting the plain programmer improve the language himself. So while as you suggest, all programming language will have warts and stumbling blocks, possibly deal breaker problems, that you can't do anything about, in Lisp, you can always and usually very easily overcome them yoursel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have done that for XSLT if it had been on the list.
Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me. What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?
template
(if eval(x) (apply-template template) nil)
Functional purity gives you the usual advantages: execution that can be testable and fast and parallelizable and predictable in space and time usage and secure in presenting little attack surface for injections and overflows and such. XSLT is exactly what it claims to be, a declarative way of transforming tree structures.
The problem with XSLT in enterprise land is that real world business requirements don't fit well into that. Real world applications involve things like iteratively computed subtotals or comparing separate records together or picking up user preferences for formatting or other sorts of conditional logic. All of which is a poor fit for XSLT and leads to really complicated XPath hacks.
And your average enterprisey programmer comes from imperative languages and thinks and codes in imperative terms, often not even realizing XSLT is a functional language. So it's no surprise that real-world XSLT ends up as muddy balls of crap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time, it's easy to ignore programming languages that you aren't familiar with. In day to day programming life, you're not going to be running into many examples of Eiffel, or Dylan, or D or E, in the wild. So you're not going to feel very strongly about them, either pro or con. For better or for worse (I think for the better), CoffeeScript is fully interoperable with JavaScript. The runtime characteristic…
Ah okay, that's a pretty interesting review. I was at an AirBnB Tech Talk and Isaac Schluetter (Head maintainer of Node.js) and he discussed his feelings on it. I've used it a few times and it's been fine, but I never felt compelled to learn it. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM-gUM9C5SA&feature=player_de...
1) That people who don't know CoffeeScript have to use CoffeeScript when they encounter CoffeeScript.
2) He thinks require might have been implemented differently, though he thinks that maybe that might have been changed, but "I don't really use it so I don't really know."
Damn Java has a 1:2 like to dislike ratio. Why do people hate on Java? I'm totally biased because it is the first language I learned and I use it daily but seriously, why the dislike? It is powerful, portable, stable, hard to shoot yourself in the foot with, and tons of standard libraries. Also the libraries (standard or 3rd party) rarely violate the rule of least surprise. I can nearly always guess the right way to…
My first real job was programming Java and I have a bit of nostalgia for it, but having to do anonymous inner classes for a simple callback is kind of annoying.