Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The JavaScript Problem

haskell.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#31

Post by jurassic »

The people who hate javascript the most are the ones who wish it was something else. I used to be one of those people. Once I decided to accept it as it is and read a few top books on the language to learn the "javascript way", my life got a lot better. It's really not that bad. I actually like it a lot, but there are still a lot of ignorant people who will look at you as if you're not l33t enough to know that foo language is better if you tell them you have a favorable view of js.

Of the things on his list, the only ones that really resonate with me at all are verbose function syntax and silent coercion. Typing function () {} gets old fast, but then I set up snippets and it ceased being a problem. That really just leaves the type coercion problem, which you adapt to pretty quickly if you're using the language in earnest.

What it boils down to is choosing to be a pragmatist who gets down to work with what's available instead of a naval gazer who swears everything will be awesome as soon as they have their preferred tool|language available. There are tons of compiles-to-js alternatives, but I don't see a huge difference in the productivity of people working in these not-JS alternatives. Where are the killer apps that were developed through a niche JS transpiler? If you want to build a web app in Haskell instead of the web's true lingua franca, all you're accomplishing is making it harder to hire and harder to collaborate.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#32

Post by kenjackson »

jurassic wrote: post #31

The people who hate javascript the most are the ones who wish it was something else. I used to be one of those people. Once I decided to accept it as it is and read a few top books on the language to learn the "javascript way", my life got a lot better. It's really not that bad. I actually like it a lot, but there are still a lot of ignorant people who will look at you as if you're not l33t enough to know that foo la…

If you want to build a web app in Haskell instead of the web's true lingua franca, all you're accomplishing is making it harder to hire and harder to collaborate.

We should be making the web multi-lingual. It's kind of absurd that we've built these great abstractions over HW and few people ever think about writing machine language. But for the web, an abstraction over several abstractions, we're largely stuck with a single language and seemingly little real effort to build a Multilanguage abstraction.

If you told me 20 years ago about what the web would become, I'd be amazed. If you went on to say that all programming would be in a single language -- I'd think you were crazy, yet here we are.

The web should have added 1st class support for plug-ins, rather than the direction we went to effectively abolish plugins from browsers.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#33

Post by hamburglar »

hippich wrote: post #21
owenversteeg wrote: post #14

I take issue with the paragraph about how Javascript sucks: * Javascript is actually untyped, not weakly typed (untyped means no type declarations, not that it has no types) and I don't see that as a problem. * Being an entirely interpreted language, JS cannot have static type checking. This has not been an issue in my experience. * I think the syntax argument is laughably ridiculous. Programming languages that live…

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 assume it's referring to the fact that 'this' changes in a given piece of code depending on how it's called, whereas other vars are lexically scoped, so you are often forced to work around the issue by making your own lexically-scoped equivalent, aka the old "var self = this;" trope.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#34

Post by Swizec »

jurassic wrote: post #31

The people who hate javascript the most are the ones who wish it was something else. I used to be one of those people. Once I decided to accept it as it is and read a few top books on the language to learn the "javascript way", my life got a lot better. It's really not that bad. I actually like it a lot, but there are still a lot of ignorant people who will look at you as if you're not l33t enough to know that foo la…

Javascript's real problem is unfamiliar semantics hidden behind familiar syntax. It throws people off and they hate the language because they think it's weird. Really, they just haven't learned how to actually use it.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#35

Post by _xczx »

wvenable wrote: post #27
owenversteeg wrote: post #14

I take issue with the paragraph about how Javascript sucks: * Javascript is actually untyped, not weakly typed (untyped means no type declarations, not that it has no types) and I don't see that as a problem. * Being an entirely interpreted language, JS cannot have static type checking. This has not been an issue in my experience. * I think the syntax argument is laughably ridiculous. Programming languages that live…

> 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 a…

It's been popping up lately. It's meant as a smear on dynamically typed languages, because dynamic has a positive connotation and untyped is decidedly negative. Pretty similar in intention to uni-typed.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23282683/is-clojure-uni-t...

Edit: Sorry, learned something new just now. I'm very, very wrong.

Untyped is where operations are valid on everything because it's all a sequence of bits.

Dynamic is completely different and refers to when the type is discovered.

Sorry. However, Javascript is definitely dynamically typed.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#36

Post by teacup50 »

briantakita wrote: post #23

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…

> People have different styles and preferences.

In terms of Haskell, it's not a question of style or preference, but provable correctness of the underlying theory.

I don't think programmers should have to be category theorists to 'effectively wield' a language, but category theorists sure as shit ought to be involved in designing the language being wielded.

I'm not a Haskeller, but I very much respect the research they've done, and continue to do -- and how it significantly improves the languages I do use.

However, the design and culture of languages like JavaScript are very much mired in inconsistent misguided design and cultural anti-intellectualism; they do not and can not benefit from the advancement in the state of the art, and are the programming equivalent of building bridges and skyscrapers without consulting structural/material engineers, based on a back-of-the-napkin sketch.

Personally, I don't prefer static typing -- I simply don't know of any other mechanism by which I can actually have a hope of understanding software I'm writing of any appreciable level of complexity.

I don't see where "preference" fits in here, other than "preferring" to not actually fully understand the system you're building.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#37

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nilkn wrote: post #18
owenversteeg wrote: post #14

I take issue with the paragraph about how Javascript sucks: * Javascript is actually untyped, not weakly typed (untyped means no type declarations, not that it has no types) and I don't see that as a problem. * Being an entirely interpreted language, JS cannot have static type checking. This has not been an issue in my experience. * I think the syntax argument is laughably ridiculous. Programming languages that live…

> untyped means no type declarations, not that it has no types I found this to be a very bizarre statement, given the existence of dynamic typing. For anyone else confused, this is the best discussion I could find of the issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9154388/does-untyped-also...

The programmer theorists view of what a "type" is will always differ from a programmer's view. If I'm talking to a bunch of theorists, I know that types are absolutely static entities, and everything else in the dynamic world are actually tags. If I'm talking to programmers and am careful to make this distinction, they will find me to be overall pedantic and verbose.

So unless one is having a discussion with someone like Bob Harper, dynamic typing absolutely makes sense and is not a misnomer.

Untyped, however, is a bag of worms that you can't really get out of. To some it means no type declarations, in which case Haskell is untyped to some extent with its excellent support for type inference. To others, untyped means the complete absence of types and type checking (static or dynamic)...like doing something completely unchecked at run time with a void* in C. The views are diverse among programmers, let alone theorists! So I just avoid this term in any case.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#38

Post by rdtsc »

girvo wrote: post #10

I've been trying to convince my workmates to try something other than pure JS (with Angular), but am not having much luck. TypeScript seems to have the most buy-in, but most of the guys in the office aren't convinced of the benefits of a proper type system, the just see it as more work for them for little upside. Any ideas?

It is hard, if you look at the article, it even says "but we are stuck with it". With Angular JS there is just not that much JS to make it a big issue. So I am not sure if that is the best framework to switch to a new language (they'd have to re-map all the tutorial and documentation and everything they learned to this new language).

Coffeescript was a very popular on HN some year or two back. Then there was kind of a backlash against it and I haven't heard much since.

Now I am looking at Dart, I think that one of the few viable alternatives coming up. They are moving to make it a standard. There is already a performant VM for it (Dartium) that can run in Chrome. It compile to JS and what what you want but it has Google behind it. So it has some chance. Dart+Angular integration is going very well. They even added IDE completion for it. So if I gave you any advice I would say look that.

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#39

Post by girvo »

WoodenChair wrote: post #11
girvo wrote: post #10

I've been trying to convince my workmates to try something other than pure JS (with Angular), but am not having much luck. TypeScript seems to have the most buy-in, but most of the guys in the office aren't convinced of the benefits of a proper type system, the just see it as more work for them for little upside. Any ideas?

What kind of office are you in? If it's filled with a lot of front-end JavaScript "ninjas" I doubt you're going to make much headway. I hate to be pejorative, but I do mean the ninja part pejoratively. My best advice would be to try to start by convincing the guys with the most dev experience in other languages/serious dev experience/(dare I be controversial and say )guys with the most formal CS education first.

Mostly back end guys who have to do front end, and the genuine front end guys are indeed "ninjas" (though, I must say they are very good at wrangling JS and debugging the problems we inevitably run into). My boss is convinced at least, and I recently just convinced the team to move to proper testing + CI system (which the boss had wanted to do for 12 months but never had enough buy In from the team, so he was pretty stoked when I brought it up), so perhaps it'll just be a waiting game.

I'm tempted to reimplement a part of the system I'm currently working on in TypeScript to demonstrate it. I do worry that I'll come across as trying to show the team up though, as I'm still pretty new here :(

Re: The JavaScript Problem

#40

Post by teacup50 »

jurassic wrote: post #31

The people who hate javascript the most are the ones who wish it was something else. I used to be one of those people. Once I decided to accept it as it is and read a few top books on the language to learn the "javascript way", my life got a lot better. It's really not that bad. I actually like it a lot, but there are still a lot of ignorant people who will look at you as if you're not l33t enough to know that foo la…

> Where are the killer apps that were developed through a niche JS transpiler? If you want to build a web app in Haskell instead of the web's true lingua franca, all you're accomplishing is making it harder to hire and harder to collaborate.

You're right about one thing: JavaScript is awful, but trying to avoid JavaScript while targeting a web browser is worse.

I simply don't write software for the web. HTML/CSS/JS is too much of a train wreck of bad design for me to find any pleasure whatsoever in the task, and I'm content leaving the job anyone that can stomach it.

However, if we followed your argument to its conclusion, we'd never escape the atrophied staleness of a browser technology core that somehow has never moved past 1995-era Netscape.

Post reply on HN