5 ms·

It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But

by cdata 10y ago

It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. It's always fair to criticize so that we ask ourselves the hard questions. So, it's also worth asking ourselves if we are staring too close to the wall when we try to paint other languages as backwards and therefore bad (or at least a bad choice). Just maybe, the language feature bullet list in your head (and corresponding subtleties of implementation) isn't the thing that matters most. Maybe the thing that really matters is something not as easy to codify as a language tool chain, like human consensus. Also, it is false association to suggest that quantity != quality is somehow particular to JavaScript. Infinite monkeys will produce infinite crap no matter what brand typewriter you give them.

collyw 10y ago
In my experience working with Perl and Python most external libraries work and are well documented. Whenever I have tried JavaScript its a vastly poorer experience. Admittedly I have far more experience with the first two languages, but that would likely find more problems with Perl or Python, no? (I don't really do PHP, but I have a feeling that I would find the experience closer to JavaScript from talking to colleagues and reading about it).
- roblabla 10y ago
  I've never had problems with docs in JS, both node and browser. The MDN is a limitless ressource of information for the base language, and for libraries, well you're going to get undocumented libraries in any language. It might be more "obvious" in JS because of the sheer amount of libraries, but I've found python libs that were very poorly documented too. This is a problem we should be HAPPY to have. Having libraries doing EXACTLY what we want, that's just missing docs, is better than the alternative I've found in many other languages : no libraries, so we have to do everything ourselves.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    I think the other poster meant 3rd party libraries, rather than the runtime. That said, the docs on (most of) the libraries I have used are generally pretty good. * Prototype - excellent docs (but library since overshadowed by jQuery) * jQuery - initially the docs were hard to follow, but they seem to have gotten better * Angular - good enough docs, and plenty of books on the larger concepts of how things fit together * moment.js - excellent docs * validatejs - excellent docs * Ramdajs - generally excellent docs, but I am less familiar with some of the FP concepts used in a few cases. The quality on some of the jQuery and Angular plugins varies a bit, admittedly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tempodox 10y ago
> explanation for why their platform / language / framework [...] did not become the de facto tool You're implying this happened to JS because of some merit. But it didn't, it was just sheer coincidence and bad luck (for most of us at least, including users).
- roblabla 10y ago
  Explain what the coincidence was ? There are alternatives everywhere (ActiveX, flash, java, visual basic IIRC). And yet here we are, with JS. I believe JS came here because it actually is the best language we have had in the web. It's so easy to throw shit arround, but let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't purely out of luck.
  - danappelxx 10y ago
    JS won out the web because it came with HTML5, not the other way around.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - recursive 10y ago
      JS won out the web long before anyone ever heard of HTML5.
  - qznc 10y ago
    JS is the only language integrated into the browser and the DOM. Netscape rejected other languages (Python, Perl, TCL) because of syntax, so Brendan Eich disguised Scheme into Java syntax and hacked up a prototype in 10 days. Today, Javascript is sooo interwoven with the DOM in browsers that it is near impossible to separate them. Google planned to do this for Dart, but gave up. If they had done this and other browser vendors had followed, adding a third and forth and more languages would have been (relatively) easy, because the abstraction were in place. Then we would have seen a healthy competition. There is asm.js. Maybe we will get a "web bytecode" at some point, but that will easily take a decade and more. The pressure is increasing, because our CPUs don't get exponentially more powerful anymore. And delivering apps via the web is still going strong.
cerved 10y ago
quantity !== quality
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about the art class which was separated into 2 groups - one group worked on a single project all semester and the other group worked on a new project every day. People in the group that worked on a project every day produced better work than people in the "single project" group. My google-fu is weak, so I cannot find the reference. I'm not suggesting that the Javascript ecosystem is filled with awesome stuff, but sometimes quantity leads to quality.
  - jodoherty 10y ago
    This is the running premise behind the book Art and Fear, which basically concludes that iteration with quality feedback is the best way to develop your abilities and produce your best work. That is, quantity is the best path to quality. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaking/dp/0961454733 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...
    - chadgeidel 10y ago
      Thank you!
    - Roboprog 10y ago
      Hmm. The "fear" aspect sounds a lot like what Steve Yegge called software conservatism.
  - smonff 10y ago
    Maybe because art art school you always do the same thing: so doing it continually for one semester or restarting projects on shorter times, the final thing would be quite the same, except that if you work on more small projects, you will maybe learn faster.
    - 10y ago
Silhouette 10y ago
The reason JavaScript is the de facto standard language for front-end web development seems obvious: it's effectively the only language for that development. There have previously been other popular choices, but browser developers have killed support for those alternatives for their own reasons.
geofft 10y ago
> But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. Because JavaScript was, and basically still is, the only option for client-side web development - that is to say, it was, and basically is, the only option for distributing sandboxed, instantly-updating executable code to users at any scale. Any other language requires me to convince users to download an application that runs with full privileges on their account. (For a while we also had Flash and Java, but then we realized that Flash and Java basically also imply full privileges, in practice, because their sandboxes don't work well.) Therefore, JS got popular; therefore, people used it. This has very little to do with the quality of the language or its libraries. Note that I am not criticizing the quality any more than I'm praising it, just saying that it's irrelevant as long as it's good enough. Basically the same thing happened with UNIX and C at a much smaller scale several decades ago, except it wasn't about client-side app development, it was about getting things to run on servers at all. UNIX isn't a fantastic OS. C isn't a fantastic language. But, in the words of Richard Gabriel's "The Rise of Worse is Better", "UNIX and C are the ultimate computer viruses." https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html JavaScript and the dynamic web the new ultimate computer viruses. But they grew much, much more quickly, and haven't had the benefit of the last forty-ish years to get decently good. UNIX and C in the middle of the UNIX wars were at least as much of a disaster.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  There's a certain amount of irony in mentioning "Worse is Better" in this context. People trying to use Javascript as a surrogate C++^H^H^H Java will be sorely disappointed. People trying to use Javascript as something that blends Scheme and Smalltalk will be using it as its creator intended. While this won't make the extreme purists happy, for many of us, Javascript is an acceptable Lisp. I have come to prefer Javascript to Java (or C#), but most of my coworkers still think in Java, so that's another issue :-)
  - geofft 10y ago
rplst8 10y ago
> But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. I believe that part of the reason is the ease of access to JS development. It allowed an inordinate amount of poorly trained devs to enter into the job market. Because you can quickly whip up fancy UIs and show them to unsuspecting non-techie types, you can quickly earn a reputation as a "computer whiz". I think there were many de facto ways of doing things before this, none of which were perfect, but some of which followed better design principles. If you look at software industries where security and stability is of utmost importance, you will not find these newer frameworks in use - nor the languages they use. I'm thinking life critical systems here.
- cdata 10y ago
  There are a few condescending attitudes at play in your comment. Consider this: just because a language is easy to pick up doesn't mean it attracts "poorly trained devs". It just means it attracts more devs, because it is easier to get into it. Putting aside any value judgement of mass appeal, my experience suggests that the most important differences between a poorly-/un- trained dev and any other kind are time and practice. So, being easy to use is a much more powerful feature for a language / framework / platform than most. Also, we should all be aspiring to use tools that enable us to quickly spin up a prototype UI that looks convincingly useful. I'm not sure why that's a knock against JS. Also consider this: the languages / frameworks / platforms before the web, and before JS, were harder to use and relatively very discouraging to new users (this also sometimes goes for the communities associated with those languages / frameworks / platforms). We all started from a place of ignorance as software developers, and many of us never would have left that place if it weren't for someone looking at us and seeing a computer whiz in the making.
  - rplst8 10y ago
    > So, being easy to use is a much more powerful feature for a language / framework / platform than most. I never said that JS was easy to use. I said it was easy to access. With JS, you don't really need an IDE, compiler, runtime etc. You need a browser, and a text editor and you can get started. It's unlike a lot of other languages in that way. In some ways, I'd argue that languages like JavaScript are harder to use, or at least harder to use well. There is a reason that languages like Ada exist with very strong type systems. Granted, Ada is not a web development language, but I think my point still holds true since languages like TypeScript are making inroads in this arena. I think spinning up "convincingly useful" UIs is part of the problem. First, in a lot of ways it's the wrong place to start for software design. It raises expectations and can create a contract in the minds of the client, customer, or user that this is what the software will do, and it will do it perfectly. I'm not claiming that I (or any other programmer) started out knowing everything. But taking the time to learn, apprentice, and hone the craft of software development (the full cycle, not just writing code) is part of the game. I think the attraction of a lot of the current web frameworks is the "whiz-bang" results you get, and it's my humble opinion that you should no more build software that way than you should a smartphone, bridge, or building. I think people need to have more respect for the software engineering field, follow best practices, and not throw out everything we've learned as each new Next Big Thing (TM) comes out.

by cdata 10y ago

collyw 10y ago

In my experience working with Perl and Python most external libraries work and are well documented. Whenever I have tried JavaScript its a vastly poorer experience. Admittedly I have far more experience with the first two languages, but that would likely find more problems with Perl or Python, no? (I don't really do PHP, but I have a feeling that I would find the experience closer to JavaScript from talking to colleagues and reading about it).

roblabla 10y ago
I've never had problems with docs in JS, both node and browser. The MDN is a limitless ressource of information for the base language, and for libraries, well you're going to get undocumented libraries in any language. It might be more "obvious" in JS because of the sheer amount of libraries, but I've found python libs that were very poorly documented too. This is a problem we should be HAPPY to have. Having libraries doing EXACTLY what we want, that's just missing docs, is better than the alternative I've found in many other languages : no libraries, so we have to do everything ourselves.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  I think the other poster meant 3rd party libraries, rather than the runtime. That said, the docs on (most of) the libraries I have used are generally pretty good. * Prototype - excellent docs (but library since overshadowed by jQuery) * jQuery - initially the docs were hard to follow, but they seem to have gotten better * Angular - good enough docs, and plenty of books on the larger concepts of how things fit together * moment.js - excellent docs * validatejs - excellent docs * Ramdajs - generally excellent docs, but I am less familiar with some of the FP concepts used in a few cases. The quality on some of the jQuery and Angular plugins varies a bit, admittedly.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tempodox 10y ago

> explanation for why their platform / language / framework [...] did not become the de facto tool You're implying this happened to JS because of some merit. But it didn't, it was just sheer coincidence and bad luck (for most of us at least, including users).

roblabla 10y ago
Explain what the coincidence was ? There are alternatives everywhere (ActiveX, flash, java, visual basic IIRC). And yet here we are, with JS. I believe JS came here because it actually is the best language we have had in the web. It's so easy to throw shit arround, but let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't purely out of luck.
- danappelxx 10y ago
  JS won out the web because it came with HTML5, not the other way around.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - recursive 10y ago
    JS won out the web long before anyone ever heard of HTML5.
- qznc 10y ago
  JS is the only language integrated into the browser and the DOM. Netscape rejected other languages (Python, Perl, TCL) because of syntax, so Brendan Eich disguised Scheme into Java syntax and hacked up a prototype in 10 days. Today, Javascript is sooo interwoven with the DOM in browsers that it is near impossible to separate them. Google planned to do this for Dart, but gave up. If they had done this and other browser vendors had followed, adding a third and forth and more languages would have been (relatively) easy, because the abstraction were in place. Then we would have seen a healthy competition. There is asm.js. Maybe we will get a "web bytecode" at some point, but that will easily take a decade and more. The pressure is increasing, because our CPUs don't get exponentially more powerful anymore. And delivering apps via the web is still going strong.

cerved 10y ago

quantity !== quality

chadgeidel 10y ago
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about the art class which was separated into 2 groups - one group worked on a single project all semester and the other group worked on a new project every day. People in the group that worked on a project every day produced better work than people in the "single project" group. My google-fu is weak, so I cannot find the reference. I'm not suggesting that the Javascript ecosystem is filled with awesome stuff, but sometimes quantity leads to quality.
- jodoherty 10y ago
  This is the running premise behind the book Art and Fear, which basically concludes that iteration with quality feedback is the best way to develop your abilities and produce your best work. That is, quantity is the best path to quality. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaking/dp/0961454733 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...
  - chadgeidel 10y ago
    Thank you!
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Hmm. The "fear" aspect sounds a lot like what Steve Yegge called software conservatism.
- smonff 10y ago
  Maybe because art art school you always do the same thing: so doing it continually for one semester or restarting projects on shorter times, the final thing would be quite the same, except that if you work on more small projects, you will maybe learn faster.
  - 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

The reason JavaScript is the de facto standard language for front-end web development seems obvious: it's effectively the only language for that development. There have previously been other popular choices, but browser developers have killed support for those alternatives for their own reasons.

geofft 10y ago

> But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. Because JavaScript was, and basically still is, the only option for client-side web development - that is to say, it was, and basically is, the only option for distributing sandboxed, instantly-updating executable code to users at any scale. Any other language requires me to convince users to download an application that runs with full privileges on their account. (For a while we also had Flash and Java, but then we realized that Flash and Java basically also imply full privileges, in practice, because their sandboxes don't work well.) Therefore, JS got popular; therefore, people used it. This has very little to do with the quality of the language or its libraries. Note that I am not criticizing the quality any more than I'm praising it, just saying that it's irrelevant as long as it's good enough. Basically the same thing happened with UNIX and C at a much smaller scale several decades ago, except it wasn't about client-side app development, it was about getting things to run on servers at all. UNIX isn't a fantastic OS. C isn't a fantastic language. But, in the words of Richard Gabriel's "The Rise of Worse is Better", "UNIX and C are the ultimate computer viruses." https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html JavaScript and the dynamic web the new ultimate computer viruses. But they grew much, much more quickly, and haven't had the benefit of the last forty-ish years to get decently good. UNIX and C in the middle of the UNIX wars were at least as much of a disaster.

Roboprog 10y ago
There's a certain amount of irony in mentioning "Worse is Better" in this context. People trying to use Javascript as a surrogate C++^H^H^H Java will be sorely disappointed. People trying to use Javascript as something that blends Scheme and Smalltalk will be using it as its creator intended. While this won't make the extreme purists happy, for many of us, Javascript is an acceptable Lisp. I have come to prefer Javascript to Java (or C#), but most of my coworkers still think in Java, so that's another issue :-)
- geofft 10y ago

rplst8 10y ago

cdata 10y ago
There are a few condescending attitudes at play in your comment. Consider this: just because a language is easy to pick up doesn't mean it attracts "poorly trained devs". It just means it attracts more devs, because it is easier to get into it. Putting aside any value judgement of mass appeal, my experience suggests that the most important differences between a poorly-/un- trained dev and any other kind are time and practice. So, being easy to use is a much more powerful feature for a language / framework / platform than most. Also, we should all be aspiring to use tools that enable us to quickly spin up a prototype UI that looks convincingly useful. I'm not sure why that's a knock against JS. Also consider this: the languages / frameworks / platforms before the web, and before JS, were harder to use and relatively very discouraging to new users (this also sometimes goes for the communities associated with those languages / frameworks / platforms). We all started from a place of ignorance as software developers, and many of us never would have left that place if it weren't for someone looking at us and seeing a computer whiz in the making.
- rplst8 10y ago
  > So, being easy to use is a much more powerful feature for a language / framework / platform than most. I never said that JS was easy to use. I said it was easy to access. With JS, you don't really need an IDE, compiler, runtime etc. You need a browser, and a text editor and you can get started. It's unlike a lot of other languages in that way. In some ways, I'd argue that languages like JavaScript are harder to use, or at least harder to use well. There is a reason that languages like Ada exist with very strong type systems. Granted, Ada is not a web development language, but I think my point still holds true since languages like TypeScript are making inroads in this arena. I think spinning up "convincingly useful" UIs is part of the problem. First, in a lot of ways it's the wrong place to start for software design. It raises expectations and can create a contract in the minds of the client, customer, or user that this is what the software will do, and it will do it perfectly. I'm not claiming that I (or any other programmer) started out knowing everything. But taking the time to learn, apprentice, and hone the craft of software development (the full cycle, not just writing code) is part of the game. I think the attraction of a lot of the current web frameworks is the "whiz-bang" results you get, and it's my humble opinion that you should no more build software that way than you should a smartphone, bridge, or building. I think people need to have more respect for the software engineering field, follow best practices, and not throw out everything we've learned as each new Next Big Thing (TM) comes out.