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I've been a professional Javascript dev for over 5 years and never once run into a bug due to any of these problems. I agree that they are problems, but their

I've been a professional Javascript dev for over 5 years and never once run into a bug due to any of these problems. I agree that they are problems, but their impact on day to day use of the language is zero. If you want examples of real problems that give good front end devs hell day in and day out, start looking at some of the libraries, tooling and abhorrent "best practices" that get thrown out and cargo culted to death by the community. The language itself is the last problem with JS

hnzix 9y ago
I've spent days tracking down a bug around a color picker widget, turns out JS was implicitly casting my string value to octal. I've worked with heaps of toy languages like Lingo, vbscript and ActionScript, and nothing has made me as viscerally angry as JavaScript (ok maybe PHP's complete lack of naming consistency). JS is an accident of history that has somehow become the de facto standard. I guess worse really is better.
- k__ 9y ago
  That's like saying group XY of people is bad because you got mugged by one person of that group one time. While I understand that a problem like this is unnerving, it isn't the rule.
  - hnzix 9y ago
    Wait, did you just call me racist for not liking JavaScript?
    - k__ 9y ago
      A chauvinist. People throwing around strawmen in here like nobodies business. We can do this with all languages and tell ourselve we're using the "superior" language.
- kaoD 9y ago
  > turns out JS was implicitly casting my string value to octal How exactly? I'm really curious. AFAIK it's pretty hard for a JS string to be casted into anything (pretty easy the other way around though). I guess maybe parseInt can do that, but that's neither casting not implicit.
  - hnzix 9y ago
    Looks like it's been fixed in ES5. From memory I was performing an operation on a html color string and if you clicked a color with a certain prefix it would crash. I could easily reproduce the bug but it took me forever to work out why JS was choking. I think I added in some ridiculous string padding to prevent the auto casting. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547836/why-doesnt-an-octal-literal-as-a-string-cast-to-a-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547836/why-doesnt-an-oc...
    - rwaldron 9y ago
      > Looks like it's been fixed in ES5 That was published 9 years ago.
  - phpnode 9y ago
    Presumably by calling parseInt('010') which used to detect zero leading strings as octal.
mythrwy 9y ago
I enjoy Javascript, have also programmed in it professionally for a little longer than you, didn't read all the docs in depth, don't have a great memory, and it on (admittedly less and less all the time) rare occasions still surprises me with unexpected or downright bizarre behavior. (But I also use other languages and thus know what sanity looks like).
innocentoldguy 9y ago
Sure, you can work around JavaScript's warts, but it is one thing to say the warts can be circumvented and quite another to claim that JavaScript is on par with well-designed languages like Python. I do agree with you that the JavaScript community's issues you mentioned are hell to deal with; however, in my opinion, JavaScript's internal weaknesses are one of the driving factors behind this churn.

hnzix 9y ago

I've spent days tracking down a bug around a color picker widget, turns out JS was implicitly casting my string value to octal. I've worked with heaps of toy languages like Lingo, vbscript and ActionScript, and nothing has made me as viscerally angry as JavaScript (ok maybe PHP's complete lack of naming consistency). JS is an accident of history that has somehow become the de facto standard. I guess worse really is better.

k__ 9y ago
That's like saying group XY of people is bad because you got mugged by one person of that group one time. While I understand that a problem like this is unnerving, it isn't the rule.
- hnzix 9y ago
  Wait, did you just call me racist for not liking JavaScript?
  - k__ 9y ago
    A chauvinist. People throwing around strawmen in here like nobodies business. We can do this with all languages and tell ourselve we're using the "superior" language.
kaoD 9y ago
> turns out JS was implicitly casting my string value to octal How exactly? I'm really curious. AFAIK it's pretty hard for a JS string to be casted into anything (pretty easy the other way around though). I guess maybe parseInt can do that, but that's neither casting not implicit.
- hnzix 9y ago
  Looks like it's been fixed in ES5. From memory I was performing an operation on a html color string and if you clicked a color with a certain prefix it would crash. I could easily reproduce the bug but it took me forever to work out why JS was choking. I think I added in some ridiculous string padding to prevent the auto casting. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547836/why-doesnt-an-octal-literal-as-a-string-cast-to-a-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547836/why-doesnt-an-oc...
  - rwaldron 9y ago
    > Looks like it's been fixed in ES5 That was published 9 years ago.
- phpnode 9y ago
  Presumably by calling parseInt('010') which used to detect zero leading strings as octal.

mythrwy 9y ago

I enjoy Javascript, have also programmed in it professionally for a little longer than you, didn't read all the docs in depth, don't have a great memory, and it on (admittedly less and less all the time) rare occasions still surprises me with unexpected or downright bizarre behavior. (But I also use other languages and thus know what sanity looks like).

innocentoldguy 9y ago

Sure, you can work around JavaScript's warts, but it is one thing to say the warts can be circumvented and quite another to claim that JavaScript is on par with well-designed languages like Python. I do agree with you that the JavaScript community's issues you mentioned are hell to deal with; however, in my opinion, JavaScript's internal weaknesses are one of the driving factors behind this churn.