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> Spend 50 hours building anything substantial with JavaScript and you'll get a good handle on them, and you'll be good to go for the next 10,000 hours. Spendi

by zeveb 10y ago

> Spend 50 hours building anything substantial with JavaScript and you'll get a good handle on them, and you'll be good to go for the next 10,000 hours. Spending 10,000 hours building things with JavaScript sounds like a pretty good definition of Hell. JavaScript is an actively, abusively bad language. It's not that it has a few warts: it's nothing but warts. Its fundamental design flaws are obscured only by its superficial design flaws. It's a really bad, tasteless language. > I don't think that's a reason for anyone to stoop to the level you have, though. I really don't think he 'stooped' to anything.

seagreen 10y ago
In case Eich reads your comment: given that it had to be done in ten days and "look like Java", JavaScript is a fine langauge. (But yeah, compared to languages that were designed over years obviously it's incredibly bad.) To quote Eich (from here[1]): " Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date -- Y2K bugs and all! Gosling...). Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_calls http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self). I'll do better in the next life. " [1] Edit: jwz.org intercepts HN links. See mjgoeke's comment.
- mjgoeke 10y ago
  I'd recommend copy+pasting the link to www.jwz.org if you want to open it... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1048
roboguy12 10y ago
> The ecosystem is terrible and the community is full of self-righteous assholes who has the collective attention span of a 2 year old > I don't think he 'stooped' to anything Really? This is supposed to be a place for civil, mature discussion. There are plenty of valid arguments against javascript as a language and as a community, there's no need for childish comments like that.
threatofrain 10y ago
I don't understand why people say javascript is such an awful language. The "Wat" video previously posted features of a few javascript idiosyncrasies, but I think most people would consider such obscure syntax combinations to be ill mannered, and most people understand to be very careful around type conversions. At a higher level of organization, the language begins to matter less and less, and what matters more are that subcomponents within a larger system obey their contracts, and that there's some concurrency strategy if you have distributed state.
- cygx 10y ago
  I don't understand why people say javascript is such an awful language. Frankly, because from a language design perspective, it is - or at least used to be: Bad scoping rules (implicit global declarations by default, function instead of lexical block scope if var is present), weird implicit conversions, no good story for code reuse/object extension so everyone doing anything complex had to cook up their own version, ... Nevertheless, I actually enjoy programming in Javascript ;)
freyr 10y ago
> It's a really bad, tasteless language. It's really not that bad. It's actually a good language, and getting better all the time. See? We can go back and forth, without any substance. But seriously, modern JS is not that bad.
- idobai 10y ago
  "It's really not that bad." - yes, it's worse... " It's actually a good language, and getting better all the time. See? We can go back and forth, without any substance." - man, go and see a language with sane typesystem and language rules ASAP. "But seriously, modern JS is not that bad." - they won't be able to fix JS otherwise it'd be an entirely different language.

by zeveb 10y ago

seagreen 10y ago

In case Eich reads your comment: given that it had to be done in ten days and "look like Java", JavaScript is a fine langauge. (But yeah, compared to languages that were designed over years obviously it's incredibly bad.) To quote Eich (from here[1]): " Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date -- Y2K bugs and all! Gosling...). Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_calls http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self). I'll do better in the next life. " [1] Edit: jwz.org intercepts HN links. See mjgoeke's comment.

mjgoeke 10y ago
I'd recommend copy+pasting the link to www.jwz.org if you want to open it... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1048

roboguy12 10y ago

> The ecosystem is terrible and the community is full of self-righteous assholes who has the collective attention span of a 2 year old > I don't think he 'stooped' to anything Really? This is supposed to be a place for civil, mature discussion. There are plenty of valid arguments against javascript as a language and as a community, there's no need for childish comments like that.

threatofrain 10y ago

I don't understand why people say javascript is such an awful language. The "Wat" video previously posted features of a few javascript idiosyncrasies, but I think most people would consider such obscure syntax combinations to be ill mannered, and most people understand to be very careful around type conversions. At a higher level of organization, the language begins to matter less and less, and what matters more are that subcomponents within a larger system obey their contracts, and that there's some concurrency strategy if you have distributed state.

cygx 10y ago
I don't understand why people say javascript is such an awful language. Frankly, because from a language design perspective, it is - or at least used to be: Bad scoping rules (implicit global declarations by default, function instead of lexical block scope if var is present), weird implicit conversions, no good story for code reuse/object extension so everyone doing anything complex had to cook up their own version, ... Nevertheless, I actually enjoy programming in Javascript ;)

freyr 10y ago

> It's a really bad, tasteless language. It's really not that bad. It's actually a good language, and getting better all the time. See? We can go back and forth, without any substance. But seriously, modern JS is not that bad.

idobai 10y ago
"It's really not that bad." - yes, it's worse... " It's actually a good language, and getting better all the time. See? We can go back and forth, without any substance." - man, go and see a language with sane typesystem and language rules ASAP. "But seriously, modern JS is not that bad." - they won't be able to fix JS otherwise it'd be an entirely different language.