5 ms·

I am a JS dev (after a lot of experience in statically typed languages) and just amazed to see the comments in this thread. At one end its experts(or near-expe

I am a JS dev (after a lot of experience in statically typed languages) and just amazed to see the comments in this thread. At one end its experts(or near-experts) and at other end is just ignorants who probably did some $(...).show() and call it javascript. No wonder why its hard to hire good javascript developers. People just don't appreciate how wonderful this language is.

Matachines 11y ago
Way too many C#/Java developers who used JS in the early 2000s and hated it still think it's the same language.
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  I probably fall into the opposite category. Moved away from statically typed languages back when .NET 3.5 was released and have settled on JS primarily JS for the past few years. I'm wiling to bet C# is 10x better than the last time I used it. Except, I don't have a good excuse to use it again to see.
- douche 11y ago
  Way too many C#/Java/Haskell/Python/Ruby/Scala developers still use it today and still think it's a heaping pile of garbage.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  The MS AJAX control toolkit and UpdatePanel probably didn't help, either. I think I can probably say that Javascript engines are an order of magnitude faster than they were 16 (!) years ago. If I may make a generalisation, C#/Java devs are more likely to be "enterprise" developers and said enterprises were more likely to be the ones on IE <11. I know I fought damn hard to upgrade from IE8 just a couple of years ago. My webdev skills suffered as a consequence, too. Microsoft moved pretty fast once they realised that IE needed to compete again - and Visual Studio evolved alongside it (mostly). VS2015 is now a pretty good development environment for Javascript/Typescript and even includes some Grunt build support (although I haven't had a play with it yet).
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    > I think I can probably say that Javascript engines are an order of magnitude faster than they were 16 (!) years ago. Two orders of magnitude. I just checked, and on my laptop http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html (the first JS thing I wrote where performance of the language itself seriously mattered) runs in about 30-60ms in modern browsers. On the same hardware, it runs in about 2200ms in Firefox 3, which is the last pre-JIT version of Firefox. Other benchmarks I've tried show similar improvements results. And that's only going back to 2008; the interpreter was a good bit slower another 8 years before that.
mickael-kerjean 11y ago
Can't agree more
workitout 11y ago
>> ignorants who probably did some $(...).show() and call it javascript So was that a dig against jQuery? >> People just don't appreciate how wonderful this language is. Ever try adding a string and an integer in JavaScript? I think developers who think JavaScript is great, love it because it's forgiving. Do what you want, the JavaScript siren says, it might work, it might not but at least you won't have an ugly all stop. I'll try to make it do something, anything, sings the siren.
- anupshinde 11y ago
  >> So was that a dig against jQuery? No way I would disrespect jQuery in any way. I learnt a lot of JS by digging into jQuery code and from this book from its author "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" But I hate it when people who have done some simple basic programming and used jQuery think that they know JS
dplgk 11y ago
It's hard to hire good javascript developers because knowing javascript doesn't imply that you know how to be a good programmer. Nowadays, you can string together 500 node modules and make an impressive demo on the surface. The moment that dev needs to dig deep and debug something or create something from scratch, they can't.

Matachines 11y ago

Way too many C#/Java developers who used JS in the early 2000s and hated it still think it's the same language.

EvanPlaice 11y ago
I probably fall into the opposite category. Moved away from statically typed languages back when .NET 3.5 was released and have settled on JS primarily JS for the past few years. I'm wiling to bet C# is 10x better than the last time I used it. Except, I don't have a good excuse to use it again to see.
douche 11y ago
Way too many C#/Java/Haskell/Python/Ruby/Scala developers still use it today and still think it's a heaping pile of garbage.
voltagex_ 11y ago
The MS AJAX control toolkit and UpdatePanel probably didn't help, either. I think I can probably say that Javascript engines are an order of magnitude faster than they were 16 (!) years ago. If I may make a generalisation, C#/Java devs are more likely to be "enterprise" developers and said enterprises were more likely to be the ones on IE <11. I know I fought damn hard to upgrade from IE8 just a couple of years ago. My webdev skills suffered as a consequence, too. Microsoft moved pretty fast once they realised that IE needed to compete again - and Visual Studio evolved alongside it (mostly). VS2015 is now a pretty good development environment for Javascript/Typescript and even includes some Grunt build support (although I haven't had a play with it yet).
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  > I think I can probably say that Javascript engines are an order of magnitude faster than they were 16 (!) years ago. Two orders of magnitude. I just checked, and on my laptop http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html http://web.mit.edu/bzbarsky/www/mandelbrot-clean.html (the first JS thing I wrote where performance of the language itself seriously mattered) runs in about 30-60ms in modern browsers. On the same hardware, it runs in about 2200ms in Firefox 3, which is the last pre-JIT version of Firefox. Other benchmarks I've tried show similar improvements results. And that's only going back to 2008; the interpreter was a good bit slower another 8 years before that.

mickael-kerjean 11y ago

Can't agree more

workitout 11y ago

>> ignorants who probably did some $(...).show() and call it javascript So was that a dig against jQuery? >> People just don't appreciate how wonderful this language is. Ever try adding a string and an integer in JavaScript? I think developers who think JavaScript is great, love it because it's forgiving. Do what you want, the JavaScript siren says, it might work, it might not but at least you won't have an ugly all stop. I'll try to make it do something, anything, sings the siren.

anupshinde 11y ago
>> So was that a dig against jQuery? No way I would disrespect jQuery in any way. I learnt a lot of JS by digging into jQuery code and from this book from its author "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" But I hate it when people who have done some simple basic programming and used jQuery think that they know JS

dplgk 11y ago

It's hard to hire good javascript developers because knowing javascript doesn't imply that you know how to be a good programmer. Nowadays, you can string together 500 node modules and make an impressive demo on the surface. The moment that dev needs to dig deep and debug something or create something from scratch, they can't.