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0 pointsspion9y ago0 comments

"JavaScript is the worst tool". Ah, no matter how many times I see it, it never fails to rub me the wrong way for some reason.

Its faster than Ruby, Python and PHP by a mile.

It now has async/await.

The amount of work that goes into making it good for front-end apps is amazing.

It has a fairly large ecosystem.

Dynamic / unityped nature lets you prototype quickly.

Tooling such as TypeScript lets you switch to static types when being dynamic just wont cut it any longer. Oh, and TypeScript has generics! (can't believe thats still a differentiator in 2017)

TypeScript can typecheck JSX templates.

It has PureScript for when you want even stronger type-checking and abstraction powers.

It doesn't have: multicore green threads (probably not going to happen) and large ints (coming soon).

Here, have a look at https://facebook.github.io/reason/ and https://facebook.github.io/reason/modules.html and see how many equivalent features it provides using just lexical closures and free-form objects (the TypeScript overlay can also approximate some features of algebraic datatypes via tagged unions and control flow analysis)

Really, the JS sucks meme is getting old, fast. Sure there are more powerful languages and higher quality ecosystems, but its quite far from being "the worst".

0 comments

cookiecaper9y ago

Thanks, this is the most convincing response so far.

In particular, I didn't realize how much faster V8 is than the reference implementations of similar languages. That can be a real and significant usage consideration and makes me less hostile to things like desktop apps. I've been operating from the "JS is slow" pre-V8 perspective, and while I knew V8 was a massive speed-up from the web perspective, I didn't consider that it was actually now among the fastest dynamic languages for non-web uses. That's a great point that should probably get promoted more often.

I still dislike a great deal about the methods and culture in the community and wish that such optimization would be directed at what, in my mind, is a more worthy target, but I know of a concrete rationale now. Thanks!

spionOP9y ago

Its not just the speed. Have you looked at ES6 code? You will see a modern language with all the bells and whistles, including classes, lambdas, coroutines, template strings, a few other sugary features and a python-like module system.

All the fixable weirdness has been fixed. Even `this` has been mostly fixed by arrow functions. It still has implicit conversions, but hey, typescript and flow make that irrelevant because they'd check statically for those.

What else is so bad about JavaScript? I really don't get it.

The DOM... thats another story.

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