Concepts to help developers master JavaScript

Post by tome » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

epicide wrote: post #17

z3t4 wrote: post #3

What got me to love JS was probably learning about variable scope, closures, and async programming.

This is what I try to convey to a lot of people who keep making jokes about JavaScript being unpredictable and hard to program. Just like everything else (especially programming languages), you are limited by your understanding of the concepts. It's only as difficult as you make it. I think so many people think of it as a toy, never bother to actually learn how it works, and assume everything either does or should wo…

Post by epicide » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #21

epicide wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I try to convey to a lot of people who keep making jokes about JavaScript being unpredictable and hard to program. Just like everything else (especially programming languages), you are limited by your understanding of the concepts. It's only as difficult as you make it. I think so many people think of it as a toy, never bother to actually learn how it works, and assume everything either does or should wo…

> It's only as difficult as you make it. Or as difficult as the authors of the code you're using made it.

Post by kazagistar » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

geezerjay wrote: post #18

epicide wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is especially important when considering what you'll see in codebases. e.g. Java may be adding support for more async stuff, but most of the Java codebases I've worked with won't use it.

Async-await is just syntactic sugar over futures/promises and java has those for decades.

Post by _greim_ » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

zachrose wrote: post #13

One intuition I’ve had while learning Elm is that it’s a fundamentally simpler language with a smaller number of concepts to learn than JavaScript. In this list of 33 JavaScript concepts, I count 11 that either do not exist in Elm or, like Object.assign, do not have an alternative to worry about: No reference types No type coercion No == vs ===, although typeof has a simpler equivalent Basically all expressions and n…

Post by zachrose » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

_greim_ wrote: post #27

zachrose wrote: post #13

One intuition I’ve had while learning Elm is that it’s a fundamentally simpler language with a smaller number of concepts to learn than JavaScript. In this list of 33 JavaScript concepts, I count 11 that either do not exist in Elm or, like Object.assign, do not have an alternative to worry about: No reference types No type coercion No == vs ===, although typeof has a simpler equivalent Basically all expressions and n…

One thing I've found with functional programming (Elm) is that writing JS requires constant mental effort. E.g. dynamic types, mutations, side effects, state. In Elm all of that neural machinery becomes obsolete, but your brain doesn't just magically switch it off. So Elm feels hard at first, until the concepts sink in a little bit and your brain re-wires itself.