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True, however some languages have much less 'sick part' than others. It is just unfortunate that we humans tend to pick up the worse of everything. There is som

True, however some languages have much less 'sick part' than others. It is just unfortunate that we humans tend to pick up the worse of everything. There is some hope though. In recent years there are many projects trying to provide a better programming experience and safer, faster results. Rust, ReasonML for example.

mosselman 9y ago
I have yet to find a better programming experience than Ruby myself, but Rust looks fine for systems programming, etc. I don't understand however why people invest so much effort in Javascript. The amount of tooling around it just baffles me, but again, to each his own.
- mercer 9y ago
  Ha, I can understand how you're baffled. As a primarily-front-end dev working with JS most of the time, I'd say the reason why it's worth it is that there's currently just no other language that runs in the front-end, or that is as ubiquitous a scripting language. Much as my dislike of JS grows as I venture further into other programming ecosystems, I still love the ability to muck about with any web page I come across. I love being able to use the Chrome/Firefox devtools for debugging, and haven't found anything quite as nice outside of the browser. I love being able to package a bunch of js and a minimal html file, and just dump it anywhere that provides basic hosting. It only barely offsets the many problems I have with JS, but because my day-job is mostly front-end, I need to deal with these problems anyways. But man I'm looking forward to a situation where I could use <preferred language> as a drop-in replacement for javascript.
  - mosselman 9y ago
    I really like Javascript, I just don't like it when you use it in React applications and the like. It feels a lot like overengineering. Want to muck around with websites with JS: https://bookmarkify.it/ https://bookmarkify.it/ (Disclaimer: shameless self-promotion on my part)
- always_good 9y ago
  Seems kind of silly to compare client-side Javascript to languages that have no client-side solution.
  - mosselman 9y ago
    That might be more of a chicken-egg situation. One might argue that you could take even a hundredth of the effort that has been put into Javascript and put it towards an alternative and you'd come a long way. Also, I am not against Javascript at all. I just don't understand the role it has been given on the back-end. There are better languages and on the other hand I don't agree with the amount of engineering that goes into front-end applications that are built in things like React. It seems silly to me to rebuild standard functionality of your browser in a framework in order to gain some interactivity that was already there to begin with through plain-old-javascript. Rather than invest all that time and effort into React, Redux, Redux-sagas, Ember, Vue, etc, etc, etc (there are a whole bunch of etc) people would have spent their time a lot more productively if they'd help out with making web components happen properly.

mosselman 9y ago

I have yet to find a better programming experience than Ruby myself, but Rust looks fine for systems programming, etc. I don't understand however why people invest so much effort in Javascript. The amount of tooling around it just baffles me, but again, to each his own.

mercer 9y ago
Ha, I can understand how you're baffled. As a primarily-front-end dev working with JS most of the time, I'd say the reason why it's worth it is that there's currently just no other language that runs in the front-end, or that is as ubiquitous a scripting language. Much as my dislike of JS grows as I venture further into other programming ecosystems, I still love the ability to muck about with any web page I come across. I love being able to use the Chrome/Firefox devtools for debugging, and haven't found anything quite as nice outside of the browser. I love being able to package a bunch of js and a minimal html file, and just dump it anywhere that provides basic hosting. It only barely offsets the many problems I have with JS, but because my day-job is mostly front-end, I need to deal with these problems anyways. But man I'm looking forward to a situation where I could use <preferred language> as a drop-in replacement for javascript.
- mosselman 9y ago
  I really like Javascript, I just don't like it when you use it in React applications and the like. It feels a lot like overengineering. Want to muck around with websites with JS: https://bookmarkify.it/ https://bookmarkify.it/ (Disclaimer: shameless self-promotion on my part)
always_good 9y ago
Seems kind of silly to compare client-side Javascript to languages that have no client-side solution.
- mosselman 9y ago
  That might be more of a chicken-egg situation. One might argue that you could take even a hundredth of the effort that has been put into Javascript and put it towards an alternative and you'd come a long way. Also, I am not against Javascript at all. I just don't understand the role it has been given on the back-end. There are better languages and on the other hand I don't agree with the amount of engineering that goes into front-end applications that are built in things like React. It seems silly to me to rebuild standard functionality of your browser in a framework in order to gain some interactivity that was already there to begin with through plain-old-javascript. Rather than invest all that time and effort into React, Redux, Redux-sagas, Ember, Vue, etc, etc, etc (there are a whole bunch of etc) people would have spent their time a lot more productively if they'd help out with making web components happen properly.