The JavaScript Problem

Could you clarify on `this`? I find how it works very obvious and natural to me, therefore not quite sure why everyone consider it broken and not 'different'?

I accept that I will be downvoted for this.

My impression of the Haskell community is its full of snobbery and complaining.

This has got to be the 4th javascript ducks post on hn in the past week.

I like hearing the positive aspects of Haskell. However, the language x sucks posts are tiresome.

Develop an imagination. Javascript can be wielded very effectively. It's just different. I hope that I or someone else wires posts on what can be done to be effective with javascript and weakly typed systems.

There are advantages to using weakly typed languages, mostly centered around flexibility and rapid iteration. The disadvantages are alleviated by comprehensive functional or black box testing. Skip the unit tests.

I feel liberated by not having a strong type system restricting my options. Ymmv. People have different styles and preferences.

Here's the problem with your post - and it has nothing to do with what you think it does. It attacks two things at once and quite distinctly. On one hand you're defending JavaScript - and that's separate from your attack on the Haskell community. It's just unfocused and confusingly conflated. I'm not going to down vote you, but you need to organize your thoughts a little more coherently if you don't want to get down voted.

PS The reason there are so many JavaScript sucks posts is because JavaScript, a language designed for very menial things in 10 days in the mid 1990s, has become the lingua franca of the world and is used for sophisticated applications outside of its wheelhouse. A lot of very respectable people believe it's a poor tool for the complex applications that it's being used for and the less respectable people just reiterate this as "it sucks". It's not that it sucks for making a photo gallery, it's that it sucks compared to other languages for making a rich, modern, immersive, large application. They key word there is large. All of the reasons they reiterate about the "why" it sucks are only relevant when you couple it with the "large".

> Javascript is actually untyped, not weakly typed (untyped means no type declarations, not that it has no types)

I've never really heard the term untyped before -- I guess I'm old school and still call that dynamic typed. But JavaScript is also weakly typed. It will automatically convert strings to numbers, etc. Some languages, like Python, are dynamically typed but also strongly typed: No type declarations but no automatic conversions.

>My impression of the Haskell community is its full of snobbery and complaining.

Probably because the Haskell community is used to having a programming language that is, in and of itself, very good. They complain because they know what they're missing when they have to use inferior tools.

>Develop an imagination. Javascript can be wielded very effectively. It's just different.

The same can be said of x86 assembly. That doesn't mean we don't complain about programming in it, and we don't try to find better alternatives. The entire field of programming language development is about finding tools that are better than the old ones, even if the old ones work OK.

>The disadvantages are alleviated by comprehensive functional or black box testing.

If you think "more testing" alleviates all the problems of weakly typed languages, you have no idea what you're missing.

>I feel liberated by not having a strong type system restricting my options.

If you feel restricted by a type system, you're using it wrong. A type system is a useful tool, not an impediment. It only prevents you from doing wrong things.

"I like assembly because it lets me do any operation on anything."