4 ms·

I disagree with some of your points. We tried writing a big web app in JavaScript, and we were extremely sad to see how hard it is to maintain JavaScript code.

I disagree with some of your points. We tried writing a big web app in JavaScript, and we were extremely sad to see how hard it is to maintain JavaScript code. I like IDE support as well, and JavaScript provides terrible type inference, clear defined structures and other things needed to get it right. People argue that there is Definitely Typed and other things that provide type interfaces for libraries, but it kinda reminds me of header files in C/C++, because it's not defined with the code. We ended up using Dart because of it's interesting take on Web Development (It doesn't just give us the DOM APIs, it improves them and does the polyfilling and that stuff for us). We have been doing this for multiple years and have had a great success. Also, I have strong opinions about JavaScript, including that it looks like a monkey made it, and that someone literally took all the bad things from other languages and put them together. All in all, it's a matter of preference. I've always gone against the crowd too (I think React is just meh, which is not popular), so there is that.

arenaninja 11y ago
Though I like React, I agree with the rest of your points. I've done small-ish projects in Node. There's tons of ways to do JavaScript that your IDE's static analyzers will not like. If you use IIFEs extensively, most of it will not be auto-completed for you. Needeless to say, same thing goes for function signatures -- good luck quickly getting through the parameters and their order (note: it's possible this has changed in the last 12 months). I like JS well enough -- the functional aspect of strings, arrays, etc. But IDE support is lacking and it makes it hard to retain control as the codebase grows.
drinchev 11y ago
Yep, I totally agree with you. This changed for me since I switched to TypeScript. It really makes your code "look" and act more professionally.

arenaninja 11y ago

Though I like React, I agree with the rest of your points. I've done small-ish projects in Node. There's tons of ways to do JavaScript that your IDE's static analyzers will not like. If you use IIFEs extensively, most of it will not be auto-completed for you. Needeless to say, same thing goes for function signatures -- good luck quickly getting through the parameters and their order (note: it's possible this has changed in the last 12 months). I like JS well enough -- the functional aspect of strings, arrays, etc. But IDE support is lacking and it makes it hard to retain control as the codebase grows.

drinchev 11y ago

Yep, I totally agree with you. This changed for me since I switched to TypeScript. It really makes your code "look" and act more professionally.