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0 pointscalibas6y ago0 comments

How is Javascript better at string manipulation? I've never encountered anything special there that I can't do in just about every other language. Javascript just has more helper functions out of the box.

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meritt6y ago· 2 in thread

I wouldn't characterize it as "better" but specifically easier and more flexible for the people writing and maintaining these scrapers. I'm also speaking more broadly about scripting languages (not javascript specifically) vs the aforementioned JVM or Go, and the ease with which you can deal with inconsistent, frequently changing, and often completely invalid inputs from a wide variety of data sources.

Plaid's use case here is automating logins, responding to captchas, manipulating those on-screen virtual keypads to respond to security questions, chaining together multiple HTTP requests, and then parsing out frequently invalid, rapidly changing, and just plain broken content from a wide multitude of banking websites.

calibasOP6y ago

To me, that seems like a case against Javascript. Invalid or broken content should return an error, the parser shouldn't try to "fix" it.

And things like data types should be strictly enforced, otherwise you can get unpredictable results, which is especially bad when you're dealing with money transfers.

meritt6y ago

> Invalid or broken content should return an error, the parser shouldn't try to "fix" it.

You would have a really difficult life in web scraping. You do not have the guarantees of well-formed data. Instead you get HTML with mismatched tags, JSON with newlines in the middle of strings, content that claims it's UTF-8 but upon closer inspection is actually GB2312, pagination endpoints with off-by-one errors, etc. It's an absolute mess and taking the stance of "well, they didn't encode their JSON correctly, so we're not going to operate on their data" isn't a very effective strategy.

> Which is especially bad when you're dealing with money transfers

Afaik Plaid is read-only. They fetch information from financial institutions and make it available through an API.

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