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The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

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Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#91
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with JS these days is not that what's there is bad. It's that there's not much there. Anything beyond the basics requires you to roll your own or go hunt for a library.

As in, there's not much in the standard library? What other options are there beyond "roll your own" or "use a library"?

Don't use?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#92
post #7

Coffeescript was well before "tree shaking" (the JS ecosystem's way of spelling "dead code removal") and code splitting, both being relatively new things in the bundler world ("tree shaking" being introduced with rollup if memory serves). Then came Acorn, which gave way to a whole slew of JS transformation bits. It also didn't help that Node was fixed at 0.12 for years and years, and we had the IO.js fork until Node…

So, what language/ecosystem do you prefer nowadays if you were free to choose?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#93

> Less that 10 years ago, JavaScript sucked bad. It had no imports, no classes, no async, no arrow functions No classes in JS was much better than with. As someone who used and contributed to CoffeeScript, I was initially excited by them but in retrospect, they've been a huge negative IMO. Douglas Crockford saw it immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=300s

I'm so sick of these paradigm religious wars. There's nothing wrong with object oriented programming. There's nothing wrong with functional, either. You use them for different purposes. These people like Crockford who talk about "Java programmers are stuck in this inferior way" are the ones who are stuck and not all that educated on programming.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are basic things to be desired with the current state of affairs, beyond the trust of Google, such as: 1) ability to debug locally, without an Internet connection. 2) ability to debug reliably, without fear of debugger features becoming 'updated' when one needs it most. The fact that no independent debugger, without the Leviathan that is Chrome, exists, only hides this aspect even more, hardly doing justice to…

Have you tried VS Code or WebStorm? They are both independent debuggers. They are quite good for debugging in my experience. I don't know that they offer profiling capabilities.

I confess that such IDEs and their plugins are not my cup of tea and have not given them a fair chance. Though I am skeptical, with the many inconsistencies that runtimes present even for Chrome, perhaps they do work and I may give them a fair try.

Still, unwilling tight coupling with an IDE is still quite unsatisfactory.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#96
I've avoided JS/TS almost entirely, and shown contempt toward it a bunch in the past. I'm now at a place where TS seems like a reasonable language for prototyping backend stuff: JS has a GC, big package ecosystem, sum types, static typing, good tooling support.

Only thing that ticks most of those boxes (IMO) is Kotlin. Anyone been down this road before (skeptic->using in prod)?

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#97
post #26

I am a product of a coding bootcamp from awhile back, so JavaScript is really the only thing I’ve ever known in my career (outside of writing some apps in Visual Basic around 2001). Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing I’ve ever known, but… I like it? I guess if I hack around on a side project and want to use vanilla JS, it’s the Wild West and there’s no rhyme or reason for anything (and everything looks gross). Bu…

I always think back to this talk when I come across a WebAssembly Text file, annotated by .wat. Highly relevant to the author's prediction about the future from 2014 as well: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are basic things to be desired with the current state of affairs, beyond the trust of Google, such as: 1) ability to debug locally, without an Internet connection. 2) ability to debug reliably, without fear of debugger features becoming 'updated' when one needs it most. The fact that no independent debugger, without the Leviathan that is Chrome, exists, only hides this aspect even more, hardly doing justice to…

Have you tried VS Code or WebStorm? They are both independent debuggers. They are quite good for debugging in my experience. I don't know that they offer profiling capabilities.

@qazxcvbnm I don't understand: you don't want to use the chrome debugger but also don't want to use an IDE debugger... it's not clear what would meet your needs and wants, you're rejecting all the main options.

Here's an overview of some of the tools in case that's useful: https://sequoia.makes.software/debugging-nodejs-talk/#55

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#99

> Less that 10 years ago, JavaScript sucked bad. It had no imports, no classes, no async, no arrow functions No classes in JS was much better than with. As someone who used and contributed to CoffeeScript, I was initially excited by them but in retrospect, they've been a huge negative IMO. Douglas Crockford saw it immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=300s

Yeah, I write all my new stuff in JS (React frontend, Node backend) and have never felt the need for defining my own classes. Wasn't actively avoiding them either. React was fully centered around classes and they ditched all that in the new hooks system.

I also don't understand the big deal with arrow functions. Yeah I use them, but they're basically regular functions except slightly shorter to write. `async` was a big improvement, though.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird

#100

> Less that 10 years ago, JavaScript sucked bad. It had no imports, no classes, no async, no arrow functions No classes in JS was much better than with. As someone who used and contributed to CoffeeScript, I was initially excited by them but in retrospect, they've been a huge negative IMO. Douglas Crockford saw it immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=300s

I'm so sick of these paradigm religious wars. There's nothing wrong with object oriented programming. There's nothing wrong with functional, either. You use them for different purposes. These people like Crockford who talk about "Java programmers are stuck in this inferior way" are the ones who are stuck and not all that educated on programming.

There's also a lot to be said for having fewer footguns. One reason I liked CoffeeScript is that it actually removed JS footguns such as "with", ==, etc.

I'd rather either Clojure or Java to using Scala and having all the possible complexity and interactions between paradigms it makes possible. Sometimes less is more.

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