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What you described is basically true for any job, and it's more about the culture surrounding the language and particular use case rather than the entry level.

by tagrun 10y ago

What you described is basically true for any job, and it's more about the culture surrounding the language and particular use case rather than the entry level. I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar. JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck.

lomnakkus 10y ago
> What you described is basically true for any job I agree, but there are a lot of jobs where it's actually effectively impossible to distinguish between good vs. bad practitioners of said jobs. I just have this feeling that it should be possible in programming. (Because it's quantifiable... or at least quantizable into "works" or "doesn't work" along any number of axes.) > I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar. Same here, only with FORTRAN and C. (This hints that this may be a meta-problem.) > JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck. Well, there is node.js, but really, the problem with JS is... JS. It's just a horrific language semantics-wise (syntax: meh). It was invented and implemented in ~7 days(?) and it really shows. (No blame towards Brendan Eich, he did the best that he could within the deadline and even got a little bit of higher-order programming in there.) It's been improving, but just imagine the burden of improving a language that's already been deployed to 1B+ computers. Not an enviable task. Hopefully WebAssembly will (in time) address these problems and give us a real way to program the front end in $WHATEVER_LANGUAGE_YOU_WANT

by tagrun 10y ago

lomnakkus 10y ago

> What you described is basically true for any job I agree, but there are a lot of jobs where it's actually effectively impossible to distinguish between good vs. bad practitioners of said jobs. I just have this feeling that it should be possible in programming. (Because it's quantifiable... or at least quantizable into "works" or "doesn't work" along any number of axes.) > I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar. Same here, only with FORTRAN and C. (This hints that this may be a meta-problem.) > JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck. Well, there is node.js, but really, the problem with JS is... JS. It's just a horrific language semantics-wise (syntax: meh). It was invented and implemented in ~7 days(?) and it really shows. (No blame towards Brendan Eich, he did the best that he could within the deadline and even got a little bit of higher-order programming in there.) It's been improving, but just imagine the burden of improving a language that's already been deployed to 1B+ computers. Not an enviable task. Hopefully WebAssembly will (in time) address these problems and give us a real way to program the front end in $WHATEVER_LANGUAGE_YOU_WANT