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What's funny to me is how JavaScript has gone from something of a joke to a very well regarded, performant, and heavily used programming language. I can clearly

What's funny to me is how JavaScript has gone from something of a joke to a very well regarded, performant, and heavily used programming language. I can clearly remember the days when proposing any significant programming in JavaScript would get a developer laughed out of the room. Is there another example of a language that has had such a 180 degree turn around in respect and popularity?

mamcx 8y ago
> respect Not much respect, but more acceptance as a unavoidable language to use that thanks of millons of $$$$/human-hours of effort to polish it... is ok-ish.
- always_good 8y ago
  I'd say it's no worse than Ruby or Python. Async-everything is what makes it better, imo. No need for Twisted/EventMachine fragmentation. This is how people end up using it on the back-end when they do have a choice. Though "respect" is a corny word to use for any language. I don't respect my screwdriver either.
- qaq 8y ago
  Modern JS is OK and TS is pretty nice
- eksemplar 8y ago
  You don’t achieve acceptance without a level of respect that comes from being useful. JS is really one of the most useful languages today. You can argue whether everything moving to web apps (and I may be using the term web apps wrong, but I’m speaking about anything that runs in a browser) is such a good idea, it’s probably not, but it’s whats happening because it’s really fucking awesome in terms of getting things to actually work across multiple devices. JS does something none of the other tech stacks does, in that it integrates really well with your current stack. I work in enterprise, we operate more than 500 different it systems, and most of them run on windows. So natural,y our operations ninjas are really great at Microsoft tech. Operating ruby, PHP, python and so on can certainly be done within the windows environment, but we’ve naturally been doing .net since it fits in better. JS fits into this infrastructure perfectly. A lot of it is thanks to MS, but we haven’t had to spend money on retraining staff to integrate modern JS into our stack. The language itself offers a lot of freedom, which includes risk, but I don’t personally think it’s worsening that regard than python.
  - mamcx 8y ago
    > You don’t achieve acceptance without a level of respect that comes from being useful But this is not the case of JS. JS is used because is the only posibility on web. Imagine if cobol was the only posible language to code on any desktop, and any other MUST transpile to it. Just by force of necessity, Cobol will get nicer. But not because is respected, is because WHAT OTHER OPTION YOU HAVE? JS eventually migrate to servers and get easier to integrate? Well that is the same with Lua and others that are even nicer. But anyway. JS win for market brute force.
goatlover 8y ago
JS had the advantage of being the default language of the web current younger generation of programmers grew up with, and then tons of resources were thrown at it. I'm sure Python, Ruby and PHP would benefit just as much from such attention, although I guess Python has had that in scientific computing, and PHP with recent 7 version and FB.
blub 8y ago
It's just tolerated, not respected, including by many JS developers. It's not that performant either, it's just that it's getting closer to Java-class performance which is enough for many types of workloads. JS is living proof that throwing enough money at a problem can go quite a long way.

mamcx 8y ago

> respect Not much respect, but more acceptance as a unavoidable language to use that thanks of millons of $$$$/human-hours of effort to polish it... is ok-ish.

always_good 8y ago
I'd say it's no worse than Ruby or Python. Async-everything is what makes it better, imo. No need for Twisted/EventMachine fragmentation. This is how people end up using it on the back-end when they do have a choice. Though "respect" is a corny word to use for any language. I don't respect my screwdriver either.
qaq 8y ago
Modern JS is OK and TS is pretty nice
eksemplar 8y ago
You don’t achieve acceptance without a level of respect that comes from being useful. JS is really one of the most useful languages today. You can argue whether everything moving to web apps (and I may be using the term web apps wrong, but I’m speaking about anything that runs in a browser) is such a good idea, it’s probably not, but it’s whats happening because it’s really fucking awesome in terms of getting things to actually work across multiple devices. JS does something none of the other tech stacks does, in that it integrates really well with your current stack. I work in enterprise, we operate more than 500 different it systems, and most of them run on windows. So natural,y our operations ninjas are really great at Microsoft tech. Operating ruby, PHP, python and so on can certainly be done within the windows environment, but we’ve naturally been doing .net since it fits in better. JS fits into this infrastructure perfectly. A lot of it is thanks to MS, but we haven’t had to spend money on retraining staff to integrate modern JS into our stack. The language itself offers a lot of freedom, which includes risk, but I don’t personally think it’s worsening that regard than python.
- mamcx 8y ago
  > You don’t achieve acceptance without a level of respect that comes from being useful But this is not the case of JS. JS is used because is the only posibility on web. Imagine if cobol was the only posible language to code on any desktop, and any other MUST transpile to it. Just by force of necessity, Cobol will get nicer. But not because is respected, is because WHAT OTHER OPTION YOU HAVE? JS eventually migrate to servers and get easier to integrate? Well that is the same with Lua and others that are even nicer. But anyway. JS win for market brute force.

goatlover 8y ago

JS had the advantage of being the default language of the web current younger generation of programmers grew up with, and then tons of resources were thrown at it. I'm sure Python, Ruby and PHP would benefit just as much from such attention, although I guess Python has had that in scientific computing, and PHP with recent 7 version and FB.

blub 8y ago

It's just tolerated, not respected, including by many JS developers. It's not that performant either, it's just that it's getting closer to Java-class performance which is enough for many types of workloads. JS is living proof that throwing enough money at a problem can go quite a long way.