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Plenty of languages do I/O, files, and co. Why choose a language plagued with warts and a half-baked ecosystem for something pedagogical? A language with all s

by dymk 8y ago

Plenty of languages do I/O, files, and co. Why choose a language plagued with warts and a half-baked ecosystem for something pedagogical? A language with all sorts of peculiarities from the '95 browser era, and not at least leverage browser technology? A language which gives you very non-interesting coarse control over resource, and has no concept of parallelism?

raxxorrax 8y ago
Easy access and fast results. Learning isn't about creating the best possible implementation. Python wpuld have been another suggestion from me personally. What language would you have used? A lot of people without a formal educational background start with established scripting languages. I you handle data, chances are that you will get in contact with javascript at some point. Using coffeescript or typescript would be a worse choice for learning, even if they counter some disadvantages of the base language in question.
rodw 8y ago
Moreover, Node.js's non-blocking, single-threaded nature is great for the kinds of plumbing that things web services and related applications require (The stuff we used to call "database-to-web" applications -- i.e., fetch some content from a data-store and render it and/or accept some content from a client and store it) but seems like a pretty poor match for disk I/O and CPU-bound applications like a database. And I'm saying this as someone that's actually a big fan of JavaScript and that does a fair amount of enterprise-scale work with it. EDIT: I meant to add: But, I think this might be beside the point. If you are looking for a language than a large number of people can more-or-less read and write, JS is a pretty good choice. If your objective is teachablity/readability rather than production-quality performance or capabilities, I think JS is probably on the short-list of candidate languages. I can't find the quote offhand but I think Douglas Crockford or someone like that described JavaScript as "the only language people feel comfortable using without learning the syntax". (This was especially true prior to server-side applications like Node.js, when JS was largely considered a toy-like language for scripting basic input validations). If nothing else, this makes JS a reasonable "executable pseudo-code"--something practically any programming can read and probably most can execute.

by dymk 8y ago

raxxorrax 8y ago

Easy access and fast results. Learning isn't about creating the best possible implementation. Python wpuld have been another suggestion from me personally. What language would you have used? A lot of people without a formal educational background start with established scripting languages. I you handle data, chances are that you will get in contact with javascript at some point. Using coffeescript or typescript would be a worse choice for learning, even if they counter some disadvantages of the base language in question.

rodw 8y ago

Moreover, Node.js's non-blocking, single-threaded nature is great for the kinds of plumbing that things web services and related applications require (The stuff we used to call "database-to-web" applications -- i.e., fetch some content from a data-store and render it and/or accept some content from a client and store it) but seems like a pretty poor match for disk I/O and CPU-bound applications like a database. And I'm saying this as someone that's actually a big fan of JavaScript and that does a fair amount of enterprise-scale work with it. EDIT: I meant to add: But, I think this might be beside the point. If you are looking for a language than a large number of people can more-or-less read and write, JS is a pretty good choice. If your objective is teachablity/readability rather than production-quality performance or capabilities, I think JS is probably on the short-list of candidate languages. I can't find the quote offhand but I think Douglas Crockford or someone like that described JavaScript as "the only language people feel comfortable using without learning the syntax". (This was especially true prior to server-side applications like Node.js, when JS was largely considered a toy-like language for scripting basic input validations). If nothing else, this makes JS a reasonable "executable pseudo-code"--something practically any programming can read and probably most can execute.