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JavaScript is Good, Actually

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Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#231

Post by Sharlin »

alkonaut wrote: post #172
daliusd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s appropriate: it is also the case that any application that can be written as an Excel spreadsheet will be (and has probably already been) written as an Excel spreadsheet.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#232

Post by [deleted] »

bgorman wrote: post #185
kuon wrote: post #175

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 whe…

Almost everyone writing JavaScript these days uses a compiler like Babel, webpack, browserfy etc..

[deleted]

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#233

Post by ben509 »

mkirklions wrote: post #199
sloxy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does world class mean? That you are good enough that people would accept your work in the United States?

It's typically used in sports and means an athlete or team has won championships in an international league, or a person is an Olympic athlete.

Coding is less explicitly competitive, but there is an element of competition to it. If you were a major contributor to a project that had displaced multiple international competitors, that'd clearly be world class. For example, Linus is a "world-class" coder because Linux is used all over the world and has displaced many operating systems.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#234

Post by chamilto »

jrs95 wrote: post #205
adjkant wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Python - JSON works very well with it and while Python has its flaws, I think it's a much better language to use.

Ehhhh...it works okay but the same fundamental serialization problem exists. The fact that dict can be roughly equivalent to JSON helps, but as soon as you start including more complex types you're going to have to use something to handle serialization/deserialization. Which really isn't that complex with Java if you're using a few convenience libraries: gson, orika/mapstruct, lombok all make it a lot less painful to…

The most common issue I run into is with datetime objects, but there are well documented workarounds. For more complex objects such as ORM objects, I think a lot of people use Marshmallow. That being said, I don't have a lot of experience, so I could be missing something obvious. What issues have you had with Python JSON serialization?

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#235

Post by Sharlin »

hungerstrike wrote: post #201
macspoofing wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not a systems programming language, so all the comparisons against typed, compiled languages are moot. No they are not 'moot'. At least not if you're building applications with 100k+ LOC. For dinky websites and small projects I'm with you. >Introducing transpiling as a mandatory pattern for JS development was a mistake. Again, what are you building? A dinky website, or a large application that you'll have to ma…

No, they are moot. I've built several 100k+ LOC apps with JavaScript. You have no clue what you're talking about.

How many of them have you had to maintain for several years?

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#236

Post by rusk »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #157
tromp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The one thing that makes Haskell not great is that its understanding is not widely intuitive. People with mathy backgrounds that don't blink at the phrase "lambda calculus" won't consider this, but a lot of people struggle with math. If you can't put it in the hands of a 6th grader (in the public school system with no special tutoring) and have a reasonable chance of it being understood (n.b. I self-taught myself ear…

Here's a thing about mathy languages too ... I've done a bit of lisp so I'd like to think I kind of get it ... but aren't computers by their very nature "imperative"? i.e. such that C or Pascal perhaps map more naturally to the underlying system? Can these mathy languages (oriented around our rationalist perspective of the world) truly ever be sympathetic to the hardware?

What I mean is, nice as these are ... is there always going to be a bit of waste when you use them?

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#237

Post by hajile »

pjmlp wrote: post #129
1897234234235 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Based on its own merits it’s a pretty average language with lots of design flaws. I don't really judge a language based on the number of design flaws. That is like judging a computer based only on its specs. >and most of its users never really got a chance to solve the same problems with a better language. I don't really think there is such a thing as "better languages". Also your statement is probably true, and was…

> Web Assembly is not supposed to remove javascript, it is supposed to be used in addition to it when you need high performance. If people try to promote it as a way to not have to use javascript, it will just result in a more fragmented client-side programming situation, where libraries are not available for particular languages, etc. I guess you have been missing the news what is being done in Go, Java, .NET, Rust,…

There's currently zero support for efficient garbage collectors and no Dom API access. Until a few more primitives are added, wasm is a pipe dream.

Even once support exists, there's a payload issue. Nobody wants to spend loads of bandwidth downloading runtimes.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#238

Post by justwalt »

mkirklions wrote: post #199
sloxy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does world class mean? That you are good enough that people would accept your work in the United States?

No less than Don Knuth’s protégé.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#239

Post by h1d »

worldsayshi wrote: post #5

Switching back to Java after having spent a long time in JavaScript land with modern standards made me realize how great JavaScript had become. The biggest reason for JavaScripts greatness to me is JSON. I couldn't understand how Java developers put up with such bulky ways to deal with data. After some time in Java land I've come back to appreciating its strengths again though. Code completion is nice. I'm kind of ho…

JSON has so many of these little but annoying limitations, I can't believe it's finalized like that.

JSON5 is something that should've been.

https://json5.org

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#240

Post by mistercow »

yedava wrote: post #223

Code spends most of its time being in production and not in development. During that time in production, developers will leave the team, bugs will show up, major enhancements will be made. So it is important that the codebase is easy to reason about, easy to refactor and easy to debug. If you take a language like Java and an IDE like Eclipse or Intellij IDEA, it is trivial to find from where a particular piece of cod…

You can always cherrypick advantages and disadvantages to make a language look "bad", or make another language look "better".
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