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I don't have a lot of experience with a ton of different languages. But it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language that is rest

by BigJono 10y ago

I don't have a lot of experience with a ton of different languages. But it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language that is restricted and unable to do various things. I have never once run into a problem that isn't easily solvable with Javascript. If anything I find it has the opposite problem, there's too many different ways to do particular things and unless others are using the same "subset" of the language that you are, their code becomes extraordinarily difficult to grok.

fiedzia 10y ago
> it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language that is restricted and unable to do various things. * No exceptions (practically) * no built-on ways of providing abstractions * No concurrency at all for a very long time * No way of dealing with binary data Those things were added later (classes, webworkers, arrays) when they became absolutely necessary. But it started and lived for a very long time as very minimal language. > I have never once run into a problem that isn't easily solvable with Javascript. Swallowing errors. Code quality. Solvable with typescript and others, but I wouldn't call it "easily sovlable".
- inimino 10y ago
  If you think JavaScript didn't have ways of providing abstractions until classes were added, you don't know JavaScript.
- spion 10y ago
  I think Promises cover the first two nicely; they are an abstraction that gets you back exceptions. Also interestingly enough, one that would be impossible to write in Go. Not sure what you mean by "no concurrency". Perhaps you meant "no parallelism"?
chillacy 10y ago
Maybe he means that JS is a language where core language development is greatly outpaced by library development? The transition to ES6 is still underway (and has been for awhile), but javascript has had tons of more "advanced" language features added both on the 3rd-party library side (jquery, underscore, lodash) and the transpiling side (coffeescript, typescript) for ages now.
- fiedzia 10y ago
  Pretty much this. I should have made this clearer.
spion 10y ago
Yeah. I wonder if JavaScript is the only language where you can tell a non-user from a mile away...
- spion 10y ago
  I realised this was wrong to say, but unable to delete this message. Hope owning up to it is just as good.

by BigJono 10y ago

fiedzia 10y ago

> it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language that is restricted and unable to do various things. * No exceptions (practically) * no built-on ways of providing abstractions * No concurrency at all for a very long time * No way of dealing with binary data Those things were added later (classes, webworkers, arrays) when they became absolutely necessary. But it started and lived for a very long time as very minimal language. > I have never once run into a problem that isn't easily solvable with Javascript. Swallowing errors. Code quality. Solvable with typescript and others, but I wouldn't call it "easily sovlable".

inimino 10y ago
If you think JavaScript didn't have ways of providing abstractions until classes were added, you don't know JavaScript.
spion 10y ago
I think Promises cover the first two nicely; they are an abstraction that gets you back exceptions. Also interestingly enough, one that would be impossible to write in Go. Not sure what you mean by "no concurrency". Perhaps you meant "no parallelism"?

chillacy 10y ago

Maybe he means that JS is a language where core language development is greatly outpaced by library development? The transition to ES6 is still underway (and has been for awhile), but javascript has had tons of more "advanced" language features added both on the 3rd-party library side (jquery, underscore, lodash) and the transpiling side (coffeescript, typescript) for ages now.

fiedzia 10y ago
Pretty much this. I should have made this clearer.

spion 10y ago

Yeah. I wonder if JavaScript is the only language where you can tell a non-user from a mile away...

spion 10y ago
I realised this was wrong to say, but unable to delete this message. Hope owning up to it is just as good.