The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

Nobody's opinions should be discarded based on their behavior. Otherwise, we'd have a scant few scientists, artists, and thinkers in history actually worth discussing. (Also, people who link to him are complicit? Are you serious?)

> Ah, you see, there's the problem... this wasn't business logic.

What is "this"?

> Most of your post amounts to "program better", which is vacuous advice

No it's not. It's certainly better than dwelling on some edge case shortcomings and limiting your growth by blaming the tools.

No tool is perfect. Learn to use it better. Master it. Improve it. If you want to use a different tool, then use a different tool. There's no need to spread negativity.

There has been plenty of progress in Javascript idioms & programming idioms in the past few decades. You can accomplish many things with Javascript and the environment will only continue to improve. Programmers will continue to get better from the ecosystem & practices that have been learned over time.

Even your mighty Haskell is not perfect. Time to accept non-perfection & evolve :-)

> Have you used languages not from the same tradition as Javascript?

Yes, I have. I also draw inspiration from other languages & environments.

> It is possible, even likely, that you are not aware of the options that are available out there, even today.

Yes, I'm aware. When they prove themselves, I'll consider using them. In the meantime (and always), I'm happily mastering my craft free of unnecessary angst.

I'm assuming the original pronounciation was lost in the war.

tl;dr: you can't necessarily change the troublesome technology, so you might have to leave. But in order to have a viable alternative to that "bad" technology, you need other people (case in point: mindshare of JS). In order to get more people to "your side", you might need to point out what is wrong with the original technology.

> But for heaven's sake, if you're not going to improve on it, stop whining about it and be grateful for the amazing things it does enable.

Sometimes you're not in a position to even be able to change something, even if you wanted to. The ideas you have in mind for a technology might fly in the face of how the community around that technology, or the guardians/maintainers of it, thinks of it - introducing these changes might break too much stuff that is dependent on it, the changes might fly in the face of the culture around that technology.

So if you have some technology that you think - subjectively, or even somewhat objectively if you have conviction enough - and you can not do anything about it, you only have two choices. Embrace it and try to work with it despite its flaws, or to abandon ship.

But if you want to abandon ship, you probably want to find a safe harbor, eventually. ie a place where you can develop or utilize some other technology. But that place might be sparsely populated, because everyone else is working with that other technology. So what do you do? You suggest that others jump ship. :)

Assuming that there is actually some kind of objective merit to complain about a specific technology, it might be wise to complain to others about that technology. That way they can hopefully use that info to make an informed choice, and perhaps abandon their current technology for another technology. In time, you might even get enough people to come over to this other technology that that community is big enough to support that technology as a valid alternative to the "bad" technology. But what if everyone just stfu'ed about what their "negative" thoughts are on a technology? Would that other technology be able to get enough "acolytes" in order to be a viable alternative? Probably not, because everyone was too "positive" and polite to point out how that technology might be better than the old technology.

Would JS even be so controversial if it wasn't for that it is so entrenched in Web development? Is that not a great example of how important mindshare can be?

Well, he just tries to reinforce that we have two symmetrical interconnected systems and yet they have to figure out how to talk to each other. What he has on the screen.