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Right when I started to enjoy the in some ways lisp-like style you can program in JavaScript all these ES6 stuff came along. I have to say, I do not like it ei

Right when I started to enjoy the in some ways lisp-like style you can program in JavaScript all these ES6 stuff came along. I have to say, I do not like it either. The problem is that now the language becomes more and more impure introducing syntax and keywords left and right. The language lives inside browser. The old ways to do it will never go away, it will just get worse and worse and become a mixture of all kinds of patterns. All of this just because some people cannot wrap their head around scoping and prototypes. I am fine with the rapid pace of change in tooling or libraries, but I think browsers could improve in other areas (DOM), so we could still move forward.

gavinpc 10y ago
I agree with you and the parent, but let me play devil's advocate for a minute... CSS? Put that sh!t in feature freeze, like, yesterday. Because javascript. Javascript? Put that sh!t in feature freeze, like yesterday, because wasm. Except... at least the reflection API's seem to "get it"—that you can't just keep adding features willy-nilly. I'll take a new metaprogramming feature that deprecates an equal number of old ones. And if you look at the MDN article the OP referred to, the reflection API is apparently intended to obsolete several existing built-ins. And as the OP also indicates, Proxy also lets programmers implement things that would otherwise be the VM's job. But of course, unlike the auto industry, we can't actually realize obsolescence, so, like I said, I agree with you.
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  True. I just fear that all languages are approaching each other until we arrive at some mess that is optionally statically-typed, object-oriented, but with functional patterns.
girvo 10y ago
> Right when I started to enjoy the in some ways lisp-like style you can program in JavaScript all these ES6 stuff came along. To be honest, it's _easier_ to do nice functional-programming in Javascript with ES6 in my opinion, just due to the cleaner syntax for destructuring assignment, lambdas, and block-scoped variables. See: https://github.com/hemanth/ramda-repl https://github.com/hemanth/ramda-repl
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Sure I can write functional es6, but now what is going to stop my coworkers from writing Java in JavaScript with es6? Pretty much the only thing JavaScript had going for it was it's simplicity. Maybe simple is the wrong word, perhaps smallness is better. Sure js packed a ton of wtf into a small language, but once you grokked the weirdness of scoping etc. you were set to understand almost all its code. This is even better if you restricted yourself to the "good parts" ala Douglas Crockford as pretty much all js devs do now. It is a crummy version scheme that you actually get to use in your day job. Sure arrow functions and "real" classes are objectively better, but I'm afraid of how enterprisey devs are going to react to them. I can foresee Java style coding guidelines being imposed upon es6 that would be very much opposed to functional styles of coding. It is a bit immature, but a lot of the hesitancy for es6 seems to be of this sort of fear that the Java dev culture will feel more at home with es6 and then stop ignoring js possible changing js dev culture in the process.
tlrobinson 10y ago
People have been doing pseudo-classical inheritance in JavaScript since forever ago, but every framework had their own slightly different way of doing it. Might as well give them a "blessed" syntax to standardize on.
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  Why? If I am programming in Angular it does not matter what React is doing and whether they are using the blessed syntax or not.
  - Wintamute 10y ago
    I can't help but say it - but nobody programs in Angular or React, people program in JavaScript. When using a framework like Angular or React there are plenty of reasons to use ES6 classes, whether in the view code, or in more idiosyncratic app actors like utils or business logic ... the benefits of having a standardised syntax should be obvious. Likewise, many people contribute to these libraries and frameworks, again using a standard syntax for common patterns is obviously beneficial to my mind.
    - allendoerfer 10y ago
      I was just illustrating the fact that there are already communities with standards. It is fine for me that some use CoffeeScript or TypeScript. There are much smaller communities in other programming languages, which also work great, so I don't see a benefit in combining them. In the contrary I would say most of the time the bigger the community gets the lower the standard falls.

gavinpc 10y ago

I agree with you and the parent, but let me play devil's advocate for a minute... CSS? Put that sh!t in feature freeze, like, yesterday. Because javascript. Javascript? Put that sh!t in feature freeze, like yesterday, because wasm. Except... at least the reflection API's seem to "get it"—that you can't just keep adding features willy-nilly. I'll take a new metaprogramming feature that deprecates an equal number of old ones. And if you look at the MDN article the OP referred to, the reflection API is apparently intended to obsolete several existing built-ins. And as the OP also indicates, Proxy also lets programmers implement things that would otherwise be the VM's job. But of course, unlike the auto industry, we can't actually realize obsolescence, so, like I said, I agree with you.

allendoerfer 10y ago
True. I just fear that all languages are approaching each other until we arrive at some mess that is optionally statically-typed, object-oriented, but with functional patterns.

girvo 10y ago

> Right when I started to enjoy the in some ways lisp-like style you can program in JavaScript all these ES6 stuff came along. To be honest, it's _easier_ to do nice functional-programming in Javascript with ES6 in my opinion, just due to the cleaner syntax for destructuring assignment, lambdas, and block-scoped variables. See: https://github.com/hemanth/ramda-repl https://github.com/hemanth/ramda-repl

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Sure I can write functional es6, but now what is going to stop my coworkers from writing Java in JavaScript with es6? Pretty much the only thing JavaScript had going for it was it's simplicity. Maybe simple is the wrong word, perhaps smallness is better. Sure js packed a ton of wtf into a small language, but once you grokked the weirdness of scoping etc. you were set to understand almost all its code. This is even better if you restricted yourself to the "good parts" ala Douglas Crockford as pretty much all js devs do now. It is a crummy version scheme that you actually get to use in your day job. Sure arrow functions and "real" classes are objectively better, but I'm afraid of how enterprisey devs are going to react to them. I can foresee Java style coding guidelines being imposed upon es6 that would be very much opposed to functional styles of coding. It is a bit immature, but a lot of the hesitancy for es6 seems to be of this sort of fear that the Java dev culture will feel more at home with es6 and then stop ignoring js possible changing js dev culture in the process.

tlrobinson 10y ago

People have been doing pseudo-classical inheritance in JavaScript since forever ago, but every framework had their own slightly different way of doing it. Might as well give them a "blessed" syntax to standardize on.

allendoerfer 10y ago
Why? If I am programming in Angular it does not matter what React is doing and whether they are using the blessed syntax or not.
- Wintamute 10y ago
  I can't help but say it - but nobody programs in Angular or React, people program in JavaScript. When using a framework like Angular or React there are plenty of reasons to use ES6 classes, whether in the view code, or in more idiosyncratic app actors like utils or business logic ... the benefits of having a standardised syntax should be obvious. Likewise, many people contribute to these libraries and frameworks, again using a standard syntax for common patterns is obviously beneficial to my mind.
  - allendoerfer 10y ago
    I was just illustrating the fact that there are already communities with standards. It is fine for me that some use CoffeeScript or TypeScript. There are much smaller communities in other programming languages, which also work great, so I don't see a benefit in combining them. In the contrary I would say most of the time the bigger the community gets the lower the standard falls.