undefined | Better HN

0 pointswvenable9y ago0 comments

> The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prototypical language that is.

This always gets trotted out as the issue. "It's not JavaScript that's bad for building large applications, it's just everyone is using it wrong."

Prototype inheritance is even more brittle and hard to follow than class-based inheritance which is why developers, for their own sanity, try and shoe-horn it in.

0 comments

5 comments · 1 top-level

astrodust9y ago· 4 in thread

We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages, we built entire operating systems in C which is notorious for quickly becoming unreadable, and we've somehow built an entire world of content using HTML and CSS.

JavaScript is just a language, and while improvements to it are being made constantly, the biggest obstacle is not the language, nor the way browser makers support it, but the absurdly slow pace of some organizations to update their browsers to something sane.

Pick a language, any language, and then restrict yourself to features only ten years old. That's what JavaScript is like in some cases, but the good news is ten years ago some pretty good things were happening.

wvenableOP9y ago

> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages

The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars.

> Pick a language, any language, and then restrict yourself to features only ten years old.

C# 2.0 in 2006 added:

    Generics
    Partial types
    Anonymous methods
    Iterators
    Nullable types
    Getter/setter separate accessibility
    Method group conversions (delegates)
    Co- and Contra-variance for delegates
    Static classes
    Delegate inference

Not to mention C# 1.0 already being statically and strongly typed, had properties and events, reference and value types, interfaces, namespaces, and a reasonably complete standard library. And that's just one language.

JavaScript is so far away from this it's not even funny. It doesn't even have proper numeric types. It's casting rules compare favorably with PHP!

So I don't buy the argument that JavaScript isn't suitable for large projects because browser makers aren't keeping up with the latest standards. JavaScript is a scripting language that's been pushed into tasks it's not suitable for because it is everywhere.

TeMPOraL9y ago

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars.

I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods.

The problem isn't with JavaScript, the problem is with the culture which glorifies mindlesss throwing of shit at a wall to see what sticks, instead of actually thinking of what one's doing and checking if a given topic wasn't already explored by smart people a few decades ago.

1 more reply

circlefavshape9y ago

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars

Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

1 more reply

astrodust9y ago

JavaScript, unlike C#, is intended to be easily implementable. The team that built Mono had a mountain of work to do before that was a useful product.

Meanwhile a college-level student can probably write a JavaScript interpreter that passes all the specification tests in six months. It won't be fast, but it will work.

Yes, there are better languages, but stop freaking out. If you're such a fan of C# then work on getting C# to transpile down to JavaScript, asm.js, or WebAssembly and ignore the ugly parts of the JavaScript language entirely.

JavaScript is both amazing and ridiculous all at once. Deal with it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

5 comments · 1 top-level

astrodust9y ago· 4 in thread

wvenableOP9y ago

> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages

> Pick a language, any language, and then restrict yourself to features only ten years old.

C# 2.0 in 2006 added:

    Generics
    Partial types
    Anonymous methods
    Iterators
    Nullable types
    Getter/setter separate accessibility
    Method group conversions (delegates)
    Co- and Contra-variance for delegates
    Static classes
    Delegate inference

JavaScript is so far away from this it's not even funny. It doesn't even have proper numeric types. It's casting rules compare favorably with PHP!

TeMPOraL9y ago

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars.

I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods.

1 more reply

circlefavshape9y ago

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars

Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

1 more reply

astrodust9y ago

JavaScript, unlike C#, is intended to be easily implementable. The team that built Mono had a mountain of work to do before that was a useful product.

Meanwhile a college-level student can probably write a JavaScript interpreter that passes all the specification tests in six months. It won't be fast, but it will work.

JavaScript is both amazing and ridiculous all at once. Deal with it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse