For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language • Hacker News Board

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#81

Post by masklinn » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 11:53 AM UTC

weland wrote: post #68

masklinn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correct answer is it has to do with weak types. No, it does not. You could define the exact same default function in Java, Haskell (requiring that the sorted type be a Show instance) or Python (hell, getting the exact same behavior in Python could hardly be simpler: `ar.sort(key=str)`. There, I broke it. That is near literally how the ECMAScript spec very explicitly defines the default comparison function. The…

> No, it does not. You could define the exact same default function in Java, Haskell (requiring that the sorted type be a Show instance) or Python (hell, getting the exact same behavior in Python could hardly be simpler: `ar.sort(key=str)` I don't use JavaScript but to me this looks like a really broken implementation over weak typing. Of course, this isn't a trait of the typing system per se as it is a trait of the…

> this looks like a really broken implementation over weak typing

No dammit, javascript does not coerce numbers to strings when comparing them, a "weak typing" implementation would behave exactly as he wants.

> What OP was probably annoyed by was the typical excuse the JS community offers for this behaviour: "it's weakly-typed so you can treat the arguments as anything you want".

That makes OP fractally wrong instead of merely broadly wrong.

> avoiding the verbosity typical of strongly-typed languages (where you have to specify the comparison function with the correct type signature)

Which you don't, not every language is Java and some actually have defaults. Which work. In fact, even in Java bloody java you don't have to provide a comparator to sort a list, as long as the list's items implement Comparable (that is, they can be compared to one another)

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#82

Post by erokar » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 11:54 AM UTC

oceanstone wrote: post #69

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

CoffeeScript was obviously inspired by Ruby. While CS is great, I've never gotten over the usage of "->" or "=>" to signify a function. To me, Ruby's "def" or "do" reads so much better. Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace. Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript? By the way, thanks for your work on _ & Backbone!

> Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript?

It's been done. Check out Opal. I can't say I miss Ruby's ends in CS.

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#83

Post by ngcazz » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 11:58 AM UTC

oceanstone wrote: post #69

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

CoffeeScript was obviously inspired by Ruby. While CS is great, I've never gotten over the usage of "->" or "=>" to signify a function. To me, Ruby's "def" or "do" reads so much better. Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace. Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript? By the way, thanks for your work on _ & Backbone!

The arrow is standard mathematical notation for function definition

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#84

Post by jashkenas » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 11:59 AM UTC

antris wrote: post #66

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

> I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, readable, and easier-to-learn language that fits in the same role as JavaScript — but to do so with a much more radical design. Do you think ClojureScript could fit this category? We have teams that use it in production without any significant problems at all.

It certainly could, and particularly so if you come from a Lisp background.

But it also connects to a larger universe of Clojure libraries and practices, and a vast history of Lisp tradition — most probably for the best. In that sense, it might be more of a maximalist approach than what I'm looking for. (And (of course) readability is in the eye of the beholder ;)

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#85

Post by acqq » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:00 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #31

> They are not solvable by making a new ECMA spec. As it turns out, many of the issues outlined are not only very much solvable by making a new ECMA spec but either already solved in ES5 or solved in ES6. > JS has callable attributes > This is a shitty design decision I strongly recommend not following the provided link, which is basically inane, uses the term "slots" in a rather disturbing manner and makes completel…

Even I who seldom use JavaScript was able to see that the title post isn't written by somebody who actually knows the subject he's writing about. I knew some of masklinn's points but not all. Thanks masklinn.

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#86

Post by Ygg2 » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:00 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #4

No matter if I agree with this or not; why the stab at Java there? I'm not sure what the resemblance, besides the name, is here? Or does OP just dislike Java (for some completely different reason) and could it just have as well been Perl or PHP or whatever a lot of people don't like?

Date API (old, not the new one that is arriving) was taken from Java. And Date library in Java is frankly... horrible.

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#87

Post by jashkenas » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:00 PM UTC

bayesianhorse wrote: post #24

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

Keep up the good work! I still think the main point around javascript is the type system or the lack thereof. I don't mind dynamic typing, but the javascript data types are central to all HTML5 APIs and most existing libraries. CoffeeScript gets this right, many others don't.

    > CoffeeScript gets this right, many others don't.

I'm not sure what you mean by that — as CoffeeScript's "type system" has no difference from JavaScript's.

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#88

Post by Mikeb85 » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:03 PM UTC

oceanstone wrote: post #69

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

CoffeeScript was obviously inspired by Ruby. While CS is great, I've never gotten over the usage of "->" or "=>" to signify a function. To me, Ruby's "def" or "do" reads so much better. Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace. Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript? By the way, thanks for your work on _ & Backbone!

People HAVE written Ruby -> Javascript compilers. Check out Opalrb, Redscript, Coldruby, Hotruby, Webruby...

The -> comes from Haskell's lambda syntax (\x -> x+1). It's a nice solution. 'Def' doesn't really work for lambdas, do does, but curly-brace blocks are nicer in Ruby if you put them everwhere {|x| x+1}... Keep in mind that Javascript is alot like Scheme in that there isn't really a difference between named and anonymous functions. You can write Scheme and Javascript pretty much the same way...

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#89

Post by dsl » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:05 PM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #64

adamnemecek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that the parent comment's author is aware of this. It does not change the fact that it's broken.

Why? Sorting strings is a far more common thing to do than just sorting numbers, so it makes sense to use simple string comparisons as the default algorithm. Rather than come up with something that first evaluates the types in the list and then tries to figure out what to do.

No, it makes sense to sort strings when you get handed strings, and sort numbers when handed numbers. Period. Default behavior is now exactly as expected by 100% of developers.

Your creativity as a language designer should only come in to play when dealing with sets of mixed type.

Re: For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language

#90

Post by nailer » Tue, Oct 29, 2013, 12:06 PM UTC

oceanstone wrote: post #69

jashkenas wrote: post #10

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye: "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough." As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, rea…

CoffeeScript was obviously inspired by Ruby. While CS is great, I've never gotten over the usage of "->" or "=>" to signify a function. To me, Ruby's "def" or "do" reads so much better. Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace. Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript? By the way, thanks for your work on _ & Backbone!

> Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace.

But in any programming language you're already indenting blocks for humans. Why repeat the same work? Especially when it allows for inconsistency between how a human and how a machine would read the code.