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0 pointslmm10y ago0 comments

> But regardless of how many insults get thrown around, or how many people seem to think JS is useless or that it's a horrible language, its probably my favorite (and I've done professional work in non-trivial applications from C and C++, to Java and go, to python, Ruby, and PHP to BusinessBasic and even some lisp).

I see one common thread between all those languages you list: none of them has a decent type system.

If you ever get the chance I'd strongly recommend trying a small project in a strongly-typed functional language - PureScript if you're targeting the browser, otherwise Haskell or Scala, or maybe F# or OCaml. (Scala and OCaml also have compile-to-JS options). If you find you don't like that style then fair enough, but it's well worth trying one language in that space and getting a sense of the techniques that it enables - it will make you a better programmer even if you end up going back to JavaScript or another language from your list.

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Klathmon10y ago

I've actually played with OCaml a bit, and Haskell a bit less. The problem is that I don't know what "problems to solve" with them, and there is no way I'm going to use something like that at work, so I kind of run out of steam before I really get into it.

I might shoot for Scala next time. We don't use Java anywhere at my current job, but I might play around with it in a personal project for a while.

I really like the functional style, and I can see how strong typing works REALLY well with it, but I've already found that it's pretty hard to bring other devs up to speed on it. And that really limits where I use it.

lmmOP10y ago

I tried to write a bit about my use cases at http://m50d.github.io/2014/05/16/signs-your-java-program.htm... and http://m50d.github.io/2015/04/21/effects.html (apologies for formatting issues). Basically I find the really useful problem that advanced type systems solve is keeping track of cross-cutting concerns (e.g. database transactions, audit logging - the kind of thing you'd be tempted to use AOP for) in a consistent way.

loganmhb10y ago

If you like Javascript and you want to try a language with a good static type system, you might like Elm (http://elm-lang.org/). As a bonus, it has fantastic documentation and examples of small in-browser projets -- a clock, Pong, and so on.

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