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It's hard to be objective on this. A modern JavaScript engineer would point out that: - The community is very accepting of new engineers. - The ecosystem

by lhnz 9y ago

It's hard to be objective on this. A modern JavaScript engineer would point out that: - The community is very accepting of new engineers. - The ecosystem is huge and there are great solutions available to many problems. - It's easy to write consistent code while avoiding many problems with the language if you use `eslint`, `prettier` and `flowtype`. Tooling on the web is excellent and rapidly improving. - You can use one language on the back-end and front-end. You can even use the same language to write desktop, embedded, command-line and curses applications. - `babel` drives the adoption of new features into the language with greater vigor than many other languages. - The VM is very fast due to lots of work by Google, Mozilla, etc. There's also methods of interacting with modules written in WebAssembly or if you're on the back-end native modules written in Rust/C++. - JavaScript is driving a lot of momentum for new programming languages (Reason, Elm, PureScript, etc) since as a transpilation target it gives you access to many environments and libraries at the get-go. In my opinion JavaScript in 2017 is a much better language than JavaScript in 2012. I wouldn't call it objectively good but I certainly wouldn't call it 'objectively bad'. There are many reasons to choose it beyond the syntax and semantics of the language itself, and there are effective treatments available for most of the warts it was once known for. It's dominating because of the sheer drive within the community, and if there were award ceremonies it'd be winning 'Most Improved' year-upon-year.

marcosdumay 9y ago
How much of that is just solving a problem created by Javascript? A community accepting of new engineers isn't. But it isn't something to brag about either, because it never means its literal sense. Instead, people say a community accepts new engineers when it has low enough standards that newbies feel empowered without learning anything new. The one language to rule them all mentality is also about low standards. The ecosystem is just compensating the lack of native features and bad overall design; so is the tooling. Babel is a great tool, but it's just compensating for the lack of a good VM at the browsers; ditto for all the transpiled languages. Besides, no JS VMs aren't very fast. They are faster than the slowest popular languages (Python, Ruby), but can't get anywhere near the moderately fast ones like Java and .Net.
- lhnz 9y ago
  Almost none of the things I mentioned are solutions to 'a problem created by JavaScript' therefore your question seems deliberately misleading. An accepting community can be a large funnel: it doesn't need to mean that nobody improves or that there are no selection effects. More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. Babel isn't merely contributing to a 'lack of a good VM'. It's more valuable to see it as a playground and streamlined process for large-scale testing of language-level features. (It solved this problem later on. It was originally meant only to solve the problem of running modern code on older VMs.) I guess you could argue that the VM should have been complete in 1995 but what programming language has managed this? Also, I don't think that comparing JavaScript's VM to the VMs of statically typed languages is fair. You mentioned yourself that in comparison to similar dynamically typed languages it's faster. Compare apples to apples. I don't think I'm bending the truth here. There's been a lot of investment into JavaScript, and not all of the problems that have been solved are obvious or easy. At this point it is ascendant because it has effectively solved lots of problems that relate to speed of change and it has done this seamlessly on a large number of platforms. I think people look at this and pattern-match to 'first-mover advantage' or 'JavaScript has a monopoly on browsers' but neither of these things were what got us to this place: it was innovation in maneuverability. (It won't necessarily stay ascendant now that it is so easy to circumvent writing JavaScript but yet still plug into its ecosystem.)
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. That needs substantiation. It's not immediately obvious in any way. About Babel, notice how we never had a problem playing with language-level features that target the PC? That's the difference a good VM makes (although on the PC case, it's not virtual). Besides, you are conflating VMs and languages somehow - they have only a tenuous relation. About the speed, Javascript misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. It's more on line with Java but if you want dynamically typed languages, with PHP and Perl too. Yet, it's not any faster than PHP and Perl. It has reasonably fast runtimes - those are not an issue for the language, but are not a big selling point either. Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is viewed as a serious language is all because it has a monopoly on the browsers. It was worked on enough that if that monopoly goes away it will still be a good choice for some stuff, but it is not an stellar language, and can't be coerced into becoming one unless it can pass through a Perl5 - Perl6 level transition.
trollopTheJope 9y ago
Javascript """engineer"""

by lhnz 9y ago

marcosdumay 9y ago

How much of that is just solving a problem created by Javascript? A community accepting of new engineers isn't. But it isn't something to brag about either, because it never means its literal sense. Instead, people say a community accepts new engineers when it has low enough standards that newbies feel empowered without learning anything new. The one language to rule them all mentality is also about low standards. The ecosystem is just compensating the lack of native features and bad overall design; so is the tooling. Babel is a great tool, but it's just compensating for the lack of a good VM at the browsers; ditto for all the transpiled languages. Besides, no JS VMs aren't very fast. They are faster than the slowest popular languages (Python, Ruby), but can't get anywhere near the moderately fast ones like Java and .Net.

lhnz 9y ago
Almost none of the things I mentioned are solutions to 'a problem created by JavaScript' therefore your question seems deliberately misleading. An accepting community can be a large funnel: it doesn't need to mean that nobody improves or that there are no selection effects. More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. Babel isn't merely contributing to a 'lack of a good VM'. It's more valuable to see it as a playground and streamlined process for large-scale testing of language-level features. (It solved this problem later on. It was originally meant only to solve the problem of running modern code on older VMs.) I guess you could argue that the VM should have been complete in 1995 but what programming language has managed this? Also, I don't think that comparing JavaScript's VM to the VMs of statically typed languages is fair. You mentioned yourself that in comparison to similar dynamically typed languages it's faster. Compare apples to apples. I don't think I'm bending the truth here. There's been a lot of investment into JavaScript, and not all of the problems that have been solved are obvious or easy. At this point it is ascendant because it has effectively solved lots of problems that relate to speed of change and it has done this seamlessly on a large number of platforms. I think people look at this and pattern-match to 'first-mover advantage' or 'JavaScript has a monopoly on browsers' but neither of these things were what got us to this place: it was innovation in maneuverability. (It won't necessarily stay ascendant now that it is so easy to circumvent writing JavaScript but yet still plug into its ecosystem.)
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > More candidates means more chaff, but also more wheat. That needs substantiation. It's not immediately obvious in any way. About Babel, notice how we never had a problem playing with language-level features that target the PC? That's the difference a good VM makes (although on the PC case, it's not virtual). Besides, you are conflating VMs and languages somehow - they have only a tenuous relation. About the speed, Javascript misses most of the expressiveness of Python and Ruby. It's more on line with Java but if you want dynamically typed languages, with PHP and Perl too. Yet, it's not any faster than PHP and Perl. It has reasonably fast runtimes - those are not an issue for the language, but are not a big selling point either. Overall, the reason Javascript still exists and is viewed as a serious language is all because it has a monopoly on the browsers. It was worked on enough that if that monopoly goes away it will still be a good choice for some stuff, but it is not an stellar language, and can't be coerced into becoming one unless it can pass through a Perl5 - Perl6 level transition.

trollopTheJope 9y ago

Javascript """engineer"""