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JavaScript is Good, Actually

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Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#171

Post by sloxy »

ZvG_Bonjwa wrote: post #155
sloxy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting because I also picked up on that: "I am a world-class software developer living in New York’s East Village" and I just thought, hmm, here's this guy with ~5 years of ~professional dev(mainly with iOS) and he self qualifies himself as world class. Looking at his bio, I see he's worked for 3 companies doing quite ordinary things. I would love to know what gave him the confidence/ignorance to describe…

Oh, come on. So the guy uses some harmless exaggeration when selling himself on his own personal website & you're taking him to programmer jail over it? Do you frequently launch into personal attacks on authors whose articles you disagree with?

If a medical doctors classifies himself as world class and then posts articles about medical matters, then my expectation would be his world class-ness is evident.

This guy's not writing an opinion piece about which brand ketchup tastes best. He has published an opinion piece in which he speaks authoritatively about matters related to the domain he claims he's a world expert in.

As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#172

Post by alkonaut »

daliusd wrote: post #37
cm2187 wrote: post #31

To me JavaScript is very similar to VBA. Based on its own merits it’s a pretty average language with lots of design flaws. But it has a monopoly for what it does (browser/cross platform vs ms office scripting) and most of its users never really got a chance to solve the same problems with a better language. And like VBA, it is probably the only language known to the bulk of it user base (semi-amateur web designers vs…

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. (2007) I personally find all programming languages limiting in one or another way and I use almost daily C#, Python and JS (sometimes I use other programming languages as well).

> Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. (2007)

Funny you should mention it. Excel will now support JS scripting.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#173

Post by dijit »

daliusd wrote: post #37
cm2187 wrote: post #31

To me JavaScript is very similar to VBA. Based on its own merits it’s a pretty average language with lots of design flaws. But it has a monopoly for what it does (browser/cross platform vs ms office scripting) and most of its users never really got a chance to solve the same problems with a better language. And like VBA, it is probably the only language known to the bulk of it user base (semi-amateur web designers vs…

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. (2007) I personally find all programming languages limiting in one or another way and I use almost daily C#, Python and JS (sometimes I use other programming languages as well).

That's life, some languages are better at different things; expecting any language to be all things to all problems is what eventually leaves you feeling like it's all hopeless I expect.

bash is good, for chaining small utilities together.

python is good, for single-threaded problems which don't hurt performance

go is good, if you don't want to manage memory and need easy concurrency, strong typing/etc

rust is good if you want to prevent having a footgun and low level access.

C++ is good for giving you complete control over hardware.

R is good for data science (although is being supplanted, many say, by python).

Javascript doesn't have to be the "best" if it's not competing at all things, unfortunately, as Jobs famously said: "The future is web applications" and now javascript (which, if we remember is from a spec written by 5 guys in 2 weeks) has to fit all use-cases... it's a tall order for any language.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#174

Post by petagonoral »

mratzloff wrote: post #120
sloxy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting because I also picked up on that: "I am a world-class software developer living in New York’s East Village" and I just thought, hmm, here's this guy with ~5 years of ~professional dev(mainly with iOS) and he self qualifies himself as world class. Looking at his bio, I see he's worked for 3 companies doing quite ordinary things. I would love to know what gave him the confidence/ignorance to describe…

Let's stick to the content of the article and not tear down our fellow engineers.

Regardless of whether tech or not, any opinion piece is framed within the context of the author of the piece.

I personally blame Jeff Atwood who pretty much green lit a lot of developers to consider themselves "elite" just because they were reading a blog about programming.

That attitude is something I'd love to see stamped out.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#175

Post by kuon »

I have been working with elm for 2 years now and shipped 4 projects.

I can say a lot of good thing about elm, but the most important one, and something that outweight a lot of thing is maintainability. Each time I had to change something in a shipped app it was painless, stressless (I know I won't add regression) and fast.

I won't say JS is bad, but the absence of a compiler makes it much more fragile, especially when working on old code.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#176

Post by qaq »

JS is ok, TypeScript is pretty good. Still I would rather use say Elixir for a large project on the backend, but for a small project node is not a bad option.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#177

Post by rusk »

tromp wrote: post #98
anton-107 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a great language (clearly demonstrated by the discussion about it being good or not) but it's not terrible I'm wondering what would be an example of a great language? Because we know that there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.

Haskell was the first thing that came to mind. I can show with one hand, by joining my pointer-finger and thumb, the number of people I know that use it.

It looks lovely, and it's something I'd very much like to learn some day but I can't for the life of me think of what I would use it for. Are there any killer apps out there for it?

At least with lisp, I can configure emacs ...

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#178

Post by viraptor »

amelius wrote: post #142
1897234234235 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think python is a terrible language. It has so little syntax you can't tell the difference between various things. A variable declaration, a reassignment, a keyword, a whatever else, they don't have any visual distinction from each other. I also find that python has reserved a whole bunch of keywords that I can't use as function names, making APIs hard to create with appropriate names. You also have to pollute your…

My main problem with Python: passing a temporary closure to a function is very messy. You can't do functional programming well in Python. Also, I think scoping rules in Python are terrible. I always end up with a namespace that is a mess. And you can't do something like this in a clean way: counter = 0 def add(n): counter += n add(1) add(2) add(3)

> And you can't do something like this in a clean way:

That's what nonlocal is for: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-no... Just stick "nonlocal counter" in your function and it works.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#179

Post by egeozcan »

SigmundA wrote: post #112
Secretmapper wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still a bit confused how this is a problem. Can you elaborate? Is there any serialisation standard that specifically addresses this? I know YAML and TOML doesn't at least (correct me if I"m wrong)

Something like Protobuf where there is a schema is defined means metadata like key name does not get repeated for every object, its only the values. No more trying to have short names to keep file size down.

IMHO, it sounds like the job of the compression algorithm, not the format.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#180

Post by sshine »

tromp wrote: post #98
anton-107 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a great language (clearly demonstrated by the discussion about it being good or not) but it's not terrible I'm wondering what would be an example of a great language? Because we know that there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.

I also like to think of Haskell as a great language. But [0,1\3..2] being a wart? Here's an old HN thread that bashes Haskell:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434516

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