The March Towards Go

> maybe I just write my code in a weird way that insulates me from those things

Maybe you do. I certainly strive to. But don't you sometimes have to work with other people's code too? I recently inherited a 10 years old codebase written by people who had not heard of implied global and didn't use the var keyword.

In my previous job I had to educate several frontend developers about the dangers of using parseInt without a radix parameter. The ones that already knew did so because… you've guessed it: They had previously gotten burned.

I worked on a project in which the backend had a rest API that served json data. Among the data were some rather long integer IDs. But since javascript doesn't have integers but only floats (of all things), the IDs got rounded off in weird ways. Not very useful as IDs after that! If all everyone ever used was javascript, this would perhaps not have surprised anyone, and it would be known by all that you shouldn't use a Number as an ID, but always only Strings. The problem is that most back-end developers are not Javascript experts and in their world it is only natural that you should be able to use a number as an ID (as it should be IMO).

As time goes by and you get experienced, you begin to learn all of these little 'quirks' of the language, and maybe you start to adopt a defensive style of programming that insulates you from the worst of them. And if you've never experienced anything else, it's easy to tell yourself that this is just the way things are, and that it's probably the same for everyone. But I'm here to tell you, that this is not the case! Sure, other (better) languages have surprising behaviours too, but they are mostly good surprises that empower instead of restrict.

Most of them are commercial.

Excelsior JET - http://www.excelsiorjet.com/

Codename One - http://www.codenameone.com/

Atego Perc - http://www.atego.com/products/atego-perc/

JamaicaVM - https://www.aicas.com/cms/en/JamaicaVM

IBM J9 - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/wireless/wece/

Atego, Jamaica and J9 are not full native compilers, rather JVMs with support for AOT deployment, similar to .NET NGEN/JIT story.

Additionally Oracle has kept the Sun's work from the meta-circular JVM, Maxime as Graal and Truffle. Which may replace Hotspot for Java 9 or later and being used by AMD/Oracle for the GPGPU support.

This Java meta-circular compiler has support for JIT and AOT compilation.

https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Main

EDIT: I forgot to mention the efforts of the guys behind RoboVM, currently the best way to target iOS with Java, http://www.robovm.org/

It basically takes all of the best parts from C++, Java, and Python, and fixes their bad parts. This has proved to be exactly what back-end and distributed systems developers have been screaming for.

> But don't you sometimes have to work with other people's code too?

Yes, I suppose I have gotten "burned" by other people's JS quite a bit...but not any more than I've been burned by other people's bad SQL or C++ or C#, to be honest.

> Sure, other (better) languages have surprising behaviours too, but they are mostly good surprises that empower instead of restrict.

I am assuming that by "better" languages you are meaning type-safe ones... I know this is not a popular opinion, but I honestly just prefer dynamic typing. When I code, there is only room for one whiny child in the equation: me. Not the language I code in. I would rather not have my language throw a temper-tantrum and break down because I gave it something a millimeter different than what it was expecting. If the object is supposed to have "thing" and it has "thing" then shut your mouth and use it, language. Where JS gets weird is that it tends to put "thing" there in some cases where you didn't expect it, but honsetly after learning the few cases where it does that, I've never had a huge problem with it - I think, like everyone, I bumped into some mild surprises (ya the radix thing with parseInt and [] == false and soforth), but they were never more than just mild surprises in development. I know it drives people insane - and some people will swear that there is no way to build large systems with it. I suspect those people are the same ones who asked the teacher for extra homework for the whole class when they were kids. That was just never me, and I would just respectfully disagree. To me JS is just a ton of fun and there are too many people making too many awesome things with it to ignore. Apparently TJ got tired of it - maybe I will one day, too.

Until then, I just wish people would recognize that the reason JS "won" the language wars of the mid-late aughts was specifically because of the "get-out-of-the-way-and-let-coders-code" dynamic built into it - IMHO the modern web could not have been built with anything else. If you have any recos for "better" languages that share that dynamic, I would be very interested in hearing them.

This is a feature. The statement might not succeed. You shouldn't use it as part of a bigger expression and assume it will work.

    t, err := foo()
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    bar(t)

this makes it totally clear that foo can fail, and if it does, then we won't call bar.

In languages with exceptions, this line just looks like

    bar(foo())

And then you can't tell that foo might fail and we might not call bar. Even if you wrap the whole thing in a try/catch, it's not clear.

This is why exceptions are an anti-pattern. They hide what functions can fail and what happens when they do.