I guess there's a lot of people who don't work with JS and learn about it from memes like this, so I feel like I have to clarify: I've been writing Javascript (well, actually Typescript, as any other sane person) professionally for quite a few years now, and I can count the amount of times I've actually been bit by these quirks on one hand. And if they added Array.sort() and MAX_SAFE_INTEGER (NEVER serialise and deserialise Facebook's and other long digit IDs as numbers), it's still better than most of the alternatives, in my opinion.
JavaScript Is Weird
81–90 of 383 posts
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not using popularity as the metric. "1 million identical websites were built with JavaScript" wouldn't say much beyond the first website. But that there is a very broad range of successful applications partly relying on JavaScript for their success undercuts the idea that JavaScript is inherently rubbish. Whether it has some subjective "quality" is a conversation best left for art galleries.
If you say JS is "pretty good" how is that not a statement about its quality?
Fair point. I guess I could rephrase it as "JavaScript provides a lot of value".
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#830.2 + 0.1 === 0.3 That's not really a JS problem, that's a floating point problem. Plenty of languages will have the same issue. +!![] "" - - "" (null - 0) + "0" Calling these things weird is fair enough but I can't help thinking this is code you'd never actually write outside of the context of a "Look how weird JS is!" post. It's like picking examples from the Annual Obfuscated C Contest to show how hard it is to un…
Some of them are stretched examples, others comes from other languages/constraints (floating point, octal, ...), but some other are legitimately weird and error prone: [1, 2, 3] + [4, 5, 6] // -> "1,2,34,5,6" [,,,].length // -> 3
The first is only weird if you expect the + operator to perform an operation on arrays. It doesn't, so each array becomes a string and those two strings are concatenated.
The second is only weird in that you are constructing an array with implicit undefined values, which is exactly what I would expect to happen if my linter didn't complain about the syntax and I had to guess what might be happening.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#84Website content on a web browser:
> This website is literally about JavaScript. I mean what did you expect, a .NET application? This website is 99.9% poorly optimized and highly questionable JS. And yet, you have JS turned off.
Yes, a website can be about Javascript and still be a collection of documents in web standards, like HTML+CSS, possibly with optional interactive features that could be implemented in Javascript.
I mean, what did you expect? That it is impossible to edit a book on paper about Javascript because obviously paper cannot run Javascript code? Even I have books about Javascript, and they render fine.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#85I have limited knowledge in web development and its history, but why is javascript a first class language in web dev when all I heard is "javascript bad"? Web assembly seems like a much better choice in hindsight where you can choose different language to compile down to wasm.
Modern Javascript, and especially compiled-to-javascript languages, like Typescript, Reason, Elm and others, are quite great. Those quirks are funny and weird, but it's not something you actually run into when you write code that isn't actively trying to show the weirdness of javascript.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#86> JavaScript is a great programming language, but ... Why are we so afraid to call trash "trash"? It's not attacking the creator, but just how can we make progress if things are not perceived as they are? https://wtfjs.com
I wouldn't say it's trash. JavaScript has many ugly quirks, but it has many good facets too, and it can be be used to write effective and fairly elegant code. Considering how quickly it was thrown together, and that's it's been evolving since then, I'd say it's a surprisingly good language.
> how can we make progress if things are not perceived as they are?
People aren't blind to JavaScript's failings. The evolution of JavaScript has been a mix of adding new features and fixing what they got wrong before, e.g. the way it has two different isNaN functions. [0]
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#87I have limited knowledge in web development and its history, but why is javascript a first class language in web dev when all I heard is "javascript bad"? Web assembly seems like a much better choice in hindsight where you can choose different language to compile down to wasm.
Most real world non-JS frontend code compiles to JS, not Wasm. Lots of apps written in ClojureScript, TypeScript, Elm etc. These are mature and Wasm has mostly only disadvantages to offer.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#880.2 + 0.1 === 0.3 That's not really a JS problem, that's a floating point problem. Plenty of languages will have the same issue. +!![] "" - - "" (null - 0) + "0" Calling these things weird is fair enough but I can't help thinking this is code you'd never actually write outside of the context of a "Look how weird JS is!" post. It's like picking examples from the Annual Obfuscated C Contest to show how hard it is to un…
> That's not really a JS problem, that's a floating point problem More accurately it's a binary problem. 0.1 and 0.3 have non-terminating representations in binary, so it's completely irrelevant whether you're using fixed or floating point. Any number that can be represented as the sum of powers of 2 and 5 have a terminating decimal representation, whereas only numbers that can be represented as the sum of powers of…
It's not a binary problem, it's a particular binary representation problem. You can represent 0.1 and 0.3 such that it terminates. In Java for example just use BigDecimal (integer unscaled value + integer scale) and you are ok.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that weird of a syntax ought to be "that weird a syntax": it's 'so [adjective] a [noun]' not 'so [adjective] of a [noun]'. It's 'so much of a syntax' but that's because 'much' is a determiner not an adjective, which really makes a much difference. Or if you want to be plain-spoken you can ofc just say 'such a weird syntax'.
https://english.stackexchange.com/a/30012/7762
Yes, the quotation from dictonary.com exactly supports what I am saying. It's a piece of spoken dialect not standard English. It's as if I was after using hiberno-English constructions in a HN comment. Will you go on out of that.
Re: JavaScript Is Weird
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you open the console to check after you're finished, it says: "What, are you going to check if the results are accurate? Go ahead " But if you open it console while doing the test, it says: "Hey, stop cheating! "
Why the hell can websites tell that I'm in the console? If I want to inspect some parts of a website (perhaps save an image), then I don't want that website to interfere.
They don’t. They just use “console.log”, you see it because you opened the console. It’s not like they know you’re there and then write a message.