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0 pointscdelsolar11y ago0 comments

Read the Good Parts of Javascript and get a JS linter. Javascript is a fine language if you do this.

0 comments

> Javascript is a fine language if you do this.

No,it's not fine, it's a horrible language,with a few good features that saves it from being a catastrophy.hence "Good Parts".

Or we wouldnt be here talking about Flow,Typescript or others if the language was "fine". JS was clearly not designed for what we are making out of it today.

But since there is no way around Javascript in webdev,good or bad,it doesnt even matter.It exists.TC39 isnt going to fix types,so types are fixed in userland.hence "Flow".

hnriot11y ago

nonsense. Just because people and companies have contributed new features and capabilities to the language doesn't make your point. It's not a horrible language, any more than any language. Of course it has things that aren't ideal, but it's highly expressive and if you know what you're doing it can be elegant.

gmac11y ago

Agreed. And things could have been enormously worse (hint: VBScript).

aflinik11y ago

You're criticizing the raw JS language, but that's not what most people in the industry are using. Fine, the original language design was horrible, but if you consider the typical stack used for web development (which could be any combination of transpilers like CoffeeScript/TypeScript, Flow, Promises, module systems, etc) it's not that bad.

Also we already have Strict mode; I imagine in the future it will get more and more uncompromising, so the JS subset we'll be actually using will be just fine.

mateuszf11y ago

Every language has good and bad parts.

jules11y ago

This can be used to justify any atrocity.

Shizka11y ago

I've had the exact same concerns as the person you replied to. I just want to make sure since the title differs from the one you stated. Is this the book you were talking about: http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor... And how/why did the book improve your opinion about the language?

callum8511y ago

It's an opinionated book that sets out a subset of JavaScript that you should use, avoiding all the 'bad parts'. This subset is what tools like JSLint and JSHint were designed to promote - they flag you up if you use a bad part. It's a seminal work. These days I find some of its rules a little dogmatic (for instance I like the 'new' keyword now), but I'm glad I went through a phase of sticking to it relgiously for a while. It taught me to stop bitching about the weird parts, just avoid them instead. And when you do this, you end up loving the language and making cool shit with it. Which is a good situation to be in, because it's the most widely distributed runtime in the world.

Havvy11y ago

But `new` is a bad part. Just an optimized bad part... You could replace every usage of it with `var instance = Object.create(Ctor.prototype);` (and change every `this` to `instance` in your code), and actually explicitly return `instance` -- and then never use `new` again. Your code will become more readable to boot, as there is less action at a distance.

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pedrocr11y ago

This is the standard advice in these threads. I've found the book quite short of that goal. It has a few patterns to make the stranger parts a bit more bearable but real world JS still fails in all sorts of non-obvious ways unless you're very familiar with it. I hope the newer versions JS versions have gotten better

It used to be that building a competent web app was something you could do in a number of different languages, these days you really need to know JS or one of it's skins and it's made developing for the web much less friendly to people that don't do it every day.

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