Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JavaScript is Good, Actually

ashfurrow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 369 posts

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#291

Post by the_af »

rusk wrote: post #273
the_af wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with…

There is no language that is innately understood. All computer languages are learned, so when they describe "intuitive" I don't think this is what is meant. However, a large portion of early programming education does take place amongst C-style curly-brackets. It's this learned setting for our precepts that makes other languages intuitive or not. If we were all learning fortran or pascal in college it might be differ…

I think you're under-stating some things. Imperative programming languages are hard beyond their initial appeal at the "this is like a recipe" level. It's debatable how people best engage with computers. There are plenty of anecdotes, if you look for them, of people failing to understand that the assignment operator in imperative languages means "place this value in this box" instead of "this means that". It's just that you (and me) are used to this learned mode of understanding.

Modern programs seldom look like a list of imperative actions anyway, beyond toy examples. They look weird and unintuitive. If you can make the leap to "this is what an actual imperative program looks like nowadays", you can make a leap to declarative/functional programs just as well. Doubly so if you don't have to unlearn years of conditioning about how programs are supposed to look :)

It currently is a self-inflicted hurdle. I don't pretend this problem doesn't exist. One way to fix it would be to start teaching programming in a different way, and with different languages.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#292

Post by the_af »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #270
the_af wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with…

> Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file. Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same resul…

> Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same result.

This is one of those assertions people should have to demonstrate with actual experiments.

I can teach someone how to write buggy, unmaintainable code that seems to work but actually doesn't in Python and JavaScript. So? :)

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#293

Post by Volt »

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.

Hugs:

    Hugs> last [0,1/3..2] > 2
    False
GHCi:

    Prelude> last [0,1/3..2] > 2
    True
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#294

Post by Volt »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #270
the_af wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with…

> Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file. Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same resul…

Have you tried it?

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#296

Post by lambdadmitry »

slikts wrote: post #137
wruza wrote: post #39

Semantics and configurability is what what makes a language great. JS doesn’t have function environments, i.e. every unlexical lookup goes to global/window and that cannot be redirected. It doesn’t have green threads (at least). There are generators, but one cannot just yield without marking all the functions generators too (async/await in modern terms). Stack traces are lost when generators throw(). JS has no good i…

The generators or async/await in JS are 'shallow' coroutines because you can only `yield` or `await` in the direct scope of a generator or async function, but the benefit of shallowness is that the control flow is explicit; you don't have to consider whether a function call will suspend the calling context's execution or not. I find the explicit clarity to outweigh the reduced power of shallow coroutines. As an aside…

> You actually can reflect on module exports and dynamically change them with node modules; you can't do it with ES modules, but that has the significant advantage of enabling static analysis.

And yet even that advantage got thrown out from the language with the introduction of "import()". Apparently static analysis is a non-goal (see discussion in [1]).

[1]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-dynamic-import/issues/35

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#297

Post by hungerstrike »

StavrosK wrote: post #211
hungerstrike wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is stopping you from generating JavaScript code to do what you want. You don't need reflection to do that. I'd hate to see Python become as popular as JavaScript and to have it be used as the defacto standard in browsers because honestly, it's nowhere near as enjoyable to use as JS.

No, Python is much more enjoyable than JS (see what happens when you turn subjective statements into objective ones?). It feels to me like JS is more for people who want to write "clever" code and Python is for people who want to write boring, more maintainable code. It doesn't help that JS has a gentler learning curve and attracts more people who just want to get things done without thinking whether those things sho…

JavaScript is more enjoyable than Python to me. You can’t really say no to that.

IMO JavaScript is for people who want to get things done quickly and efficiently and have their program work everywhere. Python is for people who like to think they are doing things “the right way” as if there were such a thing.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#298

Post by AnimalMuppet »

the_af wrote: post #291
rusk wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no language that is innately understood. All computer languages are learned, so when they describe "intuitive" I don't think this is what is meant. However, a large portion of early programming education does take place amongst C-style curly-brackets. It's this learned setting for our precepts that makes other languages intuitive or not. If we were all learning fortran or pascal in college it might be differ…

I think you're under-stating some things. Imperative programming languages are hard beyond their initial appeal at the "this is like a recipe" level. It's debatable how people best engage with computers. There are plenty of anecdotes, if you look for them, of people failing to understand that the assignment operator in imperative languages means "place this value in this box" instead of "this means that". It's just t…

> There are plenty of anecdotes, if you look for them, of people failing to understand that the assignment operator in imperative languages means "place this value in this box" instead of "this means that".

Are there anecdotes of non-absolute-beginners failing to understand that? For first-year students, sure. Do working software engineers have trouble with it? Do they have bugs and/or lower productivity because of it?

> If you can make the leap to "this is what an actual imperative program looks like nowadays", you can make a leap to declarative/functional programs just as well.

My own suspicion (completely unsupported by data) is that some peoples' brains find imperative languages to be more the way they think, and some find functional languages to fit their way of thinking better. You could run an experiment to test that - you'd take a group (call it A) of functional programmers, and a group B of imperative programmers, and measure their productivity. You'd then split the groups in half. A1 stays functional; A2 starts programming in imperative languages. B1 stays imperative; B2 goes to functional. Two years later, you measure everybody's productivity again. What I expect you'd find is that some of the people who switched (either way) increased productivity, and some declined.

What you might find is that everybody who switched from functional to imperative was less productive, but that might be because the (somewhat rare) people who are already functional programmers are almost exclusively the ones whose minds work better that way. You could fix that by starting with students or with fresh graduates, and arbitrarily assigning them to group A or group B. Then you'd have to wait a couple of years to measure their productivity the first time.

The difficulty, of course, is figuring out a way to at least somewhat objectively measure their productivity...

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#299

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

the_af wrote: post #292
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file. Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same resul…

> Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same result. This is one of those assertions people should have to demonstrate with actual experiments. I can teach someone how to write buggy, unmaintainable code that seems to work but actually doesn't in Python and JavaScript. So? :)

> I can teach someone how to write buggy, unmaintainable code that seems to work but actually doesn't in Python and JavaScript. So? :)

Yes, because that property is totally absent from Haskell.

https://github.com/RNCryptor/rncryptor-hs/issues/2#issuecomm...

Oops. Surely the JS and Python implementations are just as bad?

https://github.com/RNCryptor/RNCryptor-python/blob/649ca23a5...

https://github.com/RNCryptor/rncryptor-js/blob/08250e00a1140...

(END SARCASM)

My point here is that, while working with a "great" and/or "better-designed" programming language can be beneficial, it's the ecosystem that really counts.

Re: JavaScript is Good, Actually

#300

Post by AnimalMuppet »

the_af wrote: post #263
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with…

> Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill.

True.

> C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill.

Also true.

> Haskell is no more or less intuitive than JavaScript.

This does not follow. I have to learn the syntax of any language, true. But that doesn't mean that all languages are equally easy/hard to learn. I learned C by reading K&R over Thanksgiving weekend while in college. I understood everything except argc and argv, even though I didn't have a compiler to experiment with. I had to learn, true; I wasn't born knowing it. But I found it to be pretty intuitive to learn.

I doubt I could have understood Haskell from reading a book over a four-day weekend, without being able to experiment, no matter how good the book.

And, sure, there could be someone out there to whom Haskell syntax is intuitively obvious, and they look at C and wonder what all the crazy symbols mean. But I suspect (but cannot prove) that such people are less common than those who find C more intuitive.

TL;DR: No language is innately known. But some can still be more intuitive (for most people) than others.

Note well: I do not take any position on JS vs. Haskell as far as how intuitive they are.

Post reply on HN