What a mess this language is becoming.
Proposal: JavaScript Structs
281–290 of 371 posts
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Javascript is not simple AT ALL. It has 3 ways to declare functions, multiple variations on arrow functions syntax, a weird prototyping inheritance system, objects you can create out of "new" on functions, object literals that can act an pseudo-classes, classes, decorators, for-i loop + maps + filter + for-in loop (with hasOwn) + forEach, async / await + promises and an invisible but always-on event loop, objects pro…
I feel like a large slice of JS’s complexity comes from footguns you aren’t really supposed to use anymore; whereas with C# the complexity feels quite layered, multiparadigmatic, something-for-everyone, syntactic-sugary. But I probably know too much about JS and not enough about C#.
> I feel like a large slice of JS’s complexity comes from footguns you aren’t really supposed to use anymore
I'm not inclined to use a language that can't be fixed.
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, all the people that used JS 15 years ago followed Douglas Crockford advice very much to heart.
Crockford hates TypeScript and loves og JS. He thinks the push to turn JS into c# is misguided and a waste of the original small talk-y beauty of The Good Parts - src he said as much to me at a lunch I went to where he was also attending.
> the original small talk-y beauty of The Good Parts
Javascript seems much, much, much closer to Lisp than to Smalltalk. Granted, all three are very dynamic, but message passing needs to be bolted onto javascript. Meanwhile pretty much all of lisp is included "for free" (...via some of the ugliest syntax you've ever used).
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as a long time C# developer (and before that, C and C++), every time I try to touch javascript I get that kind of allergic reaction - not because of the language features itself, but the ecosystem. In theory npm and nuget are the same kind of complexity; in practice, all the complexity of C# building disappears into Visual Studio. A lot of people seem to think that the overall size and "complexity" of the la…
> in practice, all the complexity of C# building disappears into Visual Studio IMO, that's even worse. It means that when you want to learn C#, you're also forced into learning a complicated tool that isn't really useful for much else. At least when I'm learning Rust or Typescript, I can keep using my existing editor. > A lot of people seem to think that the overall size and "complexity" of the language (and only the…
> in practice, all the complexity of C# building disappears into Visual Studio
> IMO, that's even worse.
To be fair, the more accurate way to phrase it is "disappears into .NET tooling". Because this part is also exposed through standard CLI of .NET, and isn't Visual Studio specific. Managing packages through npm and dotnet is quite similar, with a significant difference that the average dependency graph of a .NET application or a package is 10 to 100 times smaller than the one of Nodejs, and the compatibility breaks happen much, much more rarely.
> It means that when you want to learn C#, you're also forced into learning a complicated tool that isn't really useful for much else.
This is untrue. On top of Visual Studio, your choices are Rider, VS Code and VSCodium, Neovim and Emacs, and anything else that integrates through VSC extension bridges, LSP and debugger adapter protocols.
I also usually recommend to all newcomers to start with CLI to manage projects and packages, because it's more straightforward than navigating through all sorts of windows in an IDE, and because they also get know the basics .NET builds on top of. It's an experience that is very similar to using Cargo.
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Javascript is not simple AT ALL. It has 3 ways to declare functions, multiple variations on arrow functions syntax, a weird prototyping inheritance system, objects you can create out of "new" on functions, object literals that can act an pseudo-classes, classes, decorators, for-i loop + maps + filter + for-in loop (with hasOwn) + forEach, async / await + promises and an invisible but always-on event loop, objects pro…
> reasons to believe JS is simple it's because people are talking past each other, and that's because people are using language wrong, and are merely talking past each other. The word simple is often used to mean "easy" or "familiar". Simple is very different from easy, and familiar things are easy but doesn't have to be simple at all. javascript is not simple, but it is easy.
> using language wrong
There is no wrong use of language; there's just people who don't bother to communicate well in the most effective language available. In this case you could simply cohere the two viewpoints since you have insight rather than blaming one party and calling them wrong (...which is wrong).
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#286What a mess this language is becoming.
I think that there is a spilling over of financially incentivized "innovation" stemming from the companies that are involved in the browser \ web space.
If you are fairly senior or aiming for some sort of promotion this is the sort of thing that looks great on your resume.
I doubt that it is driven by a desire to help consuming devs build better quality products more quickly or easily.
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, Javascript is so complex that one of the seminal books on it was specifically "The Good Parts", cutting down the scope of it to just the parts of the language that were considered decent and useful.
I think the distinction with JavaScript compared to other 'complex' languages is that you don't have to go beyond "The Good Parts" to achieve significant functionality, and it has become idiomatic to use the good subset. In some respects I think if there were a well defined "Typescript, The Good Parts" I would happily migrate to that. I do wonder if there will, one day, be a breaking fork of JavaScript that only remo…
That's certainly true when writing code, but when you are reading code someone else wrote that flies right out the window. This is hardly a unique problem with Javascript, many languages get tagged as "write only" because there is such a large array of available features that you never know which subset someone is going to use. C++ is notorious for this for example.
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Like, you can declare a variable with var, let or const but there's absolutely no reason to use var any more. I am going to continue to use var for everything, because I think let and const are stupid. It is not cool or interesting to learn about new scoping rules introduced by let, and it is not cool or interesting that so many people — especially juniors, but not exclusively — are lulled into a false sense of sec…
"let" is one of the good parts. Just don't use const or var.
Why is it? Why is block scoping useful?
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#289I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…
> Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly … and the people working on these projects need to deliver, else their performance review won’t be good, and their financial rewards (merit increase, bonus, refresher) will be low. And here we are. Edit: I realize I’m repeating what you said too, but I wanted to make it more clear what’s going on.
From what I've been told, all the nice bonuses and career opportunities are in Azure and other, more business-centric areas. You go to DevDiv to work on Roslyn (C#) or .NET itself because you can do so and care about either or both first and foremost.
Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crockford hates TypeScript and loves og JS. He thinks the push to turn JS into c# is misguided and a waste of the original small talk-y beauty of The Good Parts - src he said as much to me at a lunch I went to where he was also attending.
> the original small talk-y beauty of The Good Parts Javascript seems much, much, much closer to Lisp than to Smalltalk. Granted, all three are very dynamic, but message passing needs to be bolted onto javascript. Meanwhile pretty much all of lisp is included "for free" (...via some of the ugliest syntax you've ever used).
Totally agree, if JS had further leaned into it's smalltalk-y-ness and ended up with dynamism similar to Ruby for example, I'd actually be really happy with it personally. True message passing and more metaprogramming features allowing you to change execution context would be fun to play around with in a forked version of JS somehow.