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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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anyfoo ◴[20 Oct 24 21:54 UTC] No.41898802[source]▶
> I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on.

It's not that hard to do the same for a less terrible language. Choose something markedly different, i.e. a low level language like rust, and you will learn a lot in the process. More so because now you can see and understand the programming world from two different vantage points. Plus, it never hurts to understand what's going on on a lower level, without an interpreter and eco-system abstracting things away so much. This can then feed back into your skills and understanding of JS.

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jauntywundrkind ◴[21 Oct 24 00:57 UTC] No.41899798[source]▶
> It's not that hard to do the same for a less terrible language.

I miss that brief era when coding culture had a moment of trying to be nice, of not crudely shooting out mouths off at each other's stuff crudely.

JS, particularly with typescript, is a pretty fine language. There's a lot of bad developers and many bad organizations not doing their part to enable & tend to their codebases, but any very popular language will likely have that problem & it's not the languages fault.

It's a weakness & a strength that JS is so flexible, can be so many different things to different people. Even though the language is so so much the same as it was a decade & even two ago, how we use it gone through multiple cycles of diversification & consolidation. Like perl, it is a post-modern language; adaptable & changing, not prescriptive. http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

If you do have negative words to say, at least have the courage & ownership to say something distinct & specific, with some arguments about what it is you are feeling.

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anyfoo ◴[21 Oct 24 01:08 UTC] No.41899836[source]▶
I’d normally agree with you, but JS is more or less designed to be terrible. It was hacked together by Brendan Eich in literally 10 days, who originally wanted to do something more Scheme-like. It was a quick and dirty hack that got stretched way beyond what it was even meant for.

It then literally had decades of ECMAscript committee effort to shape it into something more useable.

I could repeat the numerous criticisms, but there’s enough funny videos about it that make a much better job pointing out its shortcomings and, sometimes, downright craziness of it.

> but any very popular language will likely have that problem & it's not the languages fault.

No, sorry, just no. I get where you are coming from, but in the case of JavaScript, its history and idiosyncrasies alone set it apart from many (most?) other languages.

Perl for example was made with love and with purpose, I don’t think it’s comparable.

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sswatson ◴[21 Oct 24 01:19 UTC] No.41899881[source]▶
JS wasn’t created in 10 days. It was prototyped in 10 days, and the prototype contained very little of the stuff people complain about.

Hillel Wayne posted about this recently:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hillel-wayne_pet-peeve-people...

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anyfoo ◴[21 Oct 24 01:42 UTC] No.41900000[source]▶
Okay, I stand corrected. So this prototype didn’t ship, or did it ship and evolve?

Brendan Eich himself calls JS a “rush job” and with many warts though, having had to add aspects that in retrospect he wouldn’t have. This snippet from your link is consistent with that:

    Also, most of JavaScript's modern flaws do *not* come from the prototyping phase. The prototype didn't have implicit type conversion (`"1" == 1`), which was added due to user feedback. And it didn't have `null`, which was added to 1.0 for better Java Interop.

   Like many people, I find JS super frustrating to use.
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jauntywundrkind ◴[21 Oct 24 03:11 UTC] No.41900364[source]▶
The implicit type conversion is good for a very funny conference video ("wat") but man, it's just so overplayed as a weakness especially versus how much real world impact it has on anyone.

And with TypeScript or linting, many of the strange comparison/conversion issues go away.

I struggle to find any substantial arguments against the js language, in spite of a lot of strong & vocal disdainful attitudes against it.

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1. anyfoo ◴[21 Oct 24 06:01 UTC] No.41901086{3}[source]▶
The implicit coercion and its weird behavior is absolutely a major footgun, not just fodder for the “wat” video. It’s something that can get you into serious trouble quite easily if left unchecked, for example by just looking at a list wrong. For someone to say that it has never caused them surprising pain in plain JavaScript is probably disingenuous. This is something that most other languages plainly don’t have as a problem, at least not as baffling.

Other things worth mentioning are the unusual scoping (by default at least), prototypes, “undefined”, and its role versus "null"... the list goes on.

I give TypeScript a lot of credit for cleaning up at least some of that mess, maybe more. But TypeScript is effectively another language on top of JS, not everyone in the ecosystem has the luxury of only dealing with it, and across all layers and components.

Is my knowledge about JavaScript outdated and obsolete? Certainly. Is the above stuff deprecated and turned off by default now? Probably. I left web development more than 10 years ago and never looked back. I’m a bit of a programming language geek, so I’ve used quite a few languages productively, and looked at many more. But not many serious programming languages have left quite the impression that JavaScript and PHP have.

In the meantime, I have always remembered that one conversation I had with someone who was an ECMAscript committee member at that time: They were working really hard to shape this language into something that makes sense and compiles well. Maybe against its will.

EDIT: Dear god, I completely forgot about JavaScript’s non-integerness, and its choice of using IEEE 754 as its basic Number type. Is that still a thing?