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JavaScript isn't ever going away, is it?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: JavaScript isn't ever going away, is it?

#3

Post by dragonwriter »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #2

Well, consider COBOL. Once the be-all-end-all of programming languages; now mostly forgotten, but still lurks out there: in production, yet largely out of sight.

> Well, consider COBOL. Once the be-all-end-all of programming languages

No, it was once dominant in a particular niche -- it was enterprise's Java long before Java was -- but it was never the "be-all-end-all" of programming languages.

Re: JavaScript isn't ever going away, is it?

#6

Post by splintercell »

JavaScript isn't going anywhere that soon. However, I must ask you, if you realize that it isn't going anywhere, couldn't you spend your energy and resources in one of the better transpiled languages like PureScript, Elm, or Scala.js (I'm intentionally not including supersets of JS).

Re: JavaScript isn't ever going away, is it?

#7

Post by BjoernKW »

"Ever" is a long time but if by that you mean "in our lifetime" then - barring the singularity and everyone technically living forever - no, JavaScript probably won't ever go away.

JavaScript, especially in its most recent iterations, is a decent language with useful properties (non-blocking; can be used purely functionally and in an object-oriented or procedural manner) and a fast runtime. It's especially suitable to the task it's mostly used for: Web app development.

I can hardly think of any programming language that'd be more appropriate in that context right now.

The only real downside is that JavaScript isn't a typed language and there are options like TypeScript that while perhaps not completely solving that particular problem at least alleviate it to a large extent. Who knows? Maybe, the next version of JavaScript will provide a type system similar to TypeScript, which given the latter's adoption and support by several large companies isn't entirely unlikely.

Re: JavaScript isn't ever going away, is it?

#9

Post by combatentropy »

Why do people hate JavaScript?

Is it because you're mixing it up with the DOM, especially the DOM of Internet Explorer of yesteryear? If so, scripting IE 6's DOM with Python would have been just as perilous.

Is it because you're mixing it up with Node.js, and its asynchronous complexity? If so, JavaScript doesn't have to work that way. And other languages could have been used the same way. Say, Node.py or Node.rb. Conversely, JavaScript could be framed in a normal, FastCGI apparatus, where everything runs more or less straightforwardly.

Is it because you're mixing it up with the messiness of NPM? See above.

Is it because JavaScript is dynamically typed, or because it has some other characteristic that seems less serious than languages like C, Java, or Go? If so, why not the same hatred for Python, Ruby, Perl, and Lua?

I myself like JavaScript's syntax more than all of the other scripting languages. I think the syntax for object literals and array literals is pleasantly terse. So is the dot notation for attributes. Combine that with how functions are first class, and you can chain them with dots instead of nesting them in parentheses. I like the new arrow syntax for functions, making the code even simpler.

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