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0 pointserikpukinskis9y ago0 comments

This is exactly right. JavaScript was a great beginner language, but it has now been "professionalized" with ES6, requiring insane build chains, transpiling, shims, all this stuff just to run a basic web site.

JavaScript has been ruined by professional programmers (mostly Rubyists) who never learned how to use the object model, or how to structure functional code well. So we get ES6 classes and promises and async and all of this junk that makes the language impossible to build and debug.

And I say this as a full time JavaScript programmer of ~5 years, after ~5 years of Ruby. I love both classic JavaScript and Ruby, but ES6 is an abomination.

    node -v
    v0.12.7

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ivraatiems9y ago· 1 in thread

I don't think JS's problems come just or mainly from its "professionalization." The big problems: Hoisting and scoping weirdness; ambiguity around common operators and type comparisons; poor behavior of "this", and on and on, are baked into the spec. JS is bad at its core level, because it is inconsistent and has broken functionality.

erikpukinskisOP9y ago

I think all of those things are great. I use this when I need a declarative data structure. I use nested scopes when I need a compositional data structure. Otherwise I use pure functions. Which is most of the time.

I love having these three choices and only these three choices. I think class inheritance, promises/async, and other similar features add complexity for little gain.

I used to revel in using fancy features. I was so excited when I found a real need for a DSL in one of my Ruby applications. I built it. I felt like a rock star. Then 12 months later I realized I could have wrote the same code, more understandably, with functions and a few arrays to index data.

You refer to JS core as "poor" and "bad" which are not very descriptive words. I am sure you have material criticisms but what are they? I read every JavaScript critique I see, and so far they mostly boil down to "it's not C" or "it's not Ruby" or "it's not Haskell".

Yah, it's not. It's simpler and unless you are building a compiler or a video game it's often better because of the simplicity.

The problem with JavaScript, IMO, is that people come from other languages, don't actually learn how the JS primitives are best used, and prematurely try to extend the language. See Promises, see classes, see async. These are all features that were only added because the developers couldn't be bothered to learn how to use exactly the features you mention.

You can argue this as bad usability on the part of JS, but the reason it gained so much traction is not just because it was in Netscape....

These are actually amazingly powerful feature implemented in a small space. As a beginner they are incredibly usable. It's only hard for experts coming from C or Ruby, who are the people wrecking the language with extensions. Lispers seem to get it.

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