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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 inv

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.

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.