3 ms·

As a longtime JS dev, I sometimes cringe for this reason when I see new features in ES. Even though I'm excited about them, when I think about experiencing them

As a longtime JS dev, I sometimes cringe for this reason when I see new features in ES. Even though I'm excited about them, when I think about experiencing them as a learner I feel intimidated. One good point the article makes that I wish more language designers accounted for is the fact that in a shared language you can't just pick and choose - to reach a level of expertise you basically have to know all of it.

Groxx 8y ago
JS especially has been a rocket-ship of new language features lately. It used to be my go-to language for new people since it was so simple (when used with a few boundaries (like every language needs)) that it could be picked up and the basics understood fairly quickly, and you can set people free to look at other people's code, and gradually learn DOM APIs and whatnot as needed. Not any more. Not even close. The amount of stuff you have to deal with immediately is far larger now. I actually miss the days when people added this kind of stuff to their transpiler of choice (e.g. coffeescript) and just used that - it doesn't need to be in the language, because it can never be removed from the language. Let fads appear and die outside that barrier, not inside.
- dccoolgai 8y ago
  Case in point the "how to deal with asynchronous stuff" problem. Callback pyramids weren't great, but the pastiche of approaches that followed (promises, generators, async functions, etc.) Is starting to feel worse.
chubot 8y ago
Yes, I think you could know "all of" of JavaScript in 2009, in the ES5 era. Does anyone even remember that anymore? I'm shocked at how much the language has changed. I was experimenting with server-side JS in 2009, before node.js was released, and I hacked on Brendan Eich's Narcissus interpreter, which gave me a good sense of the language. Now when I look at example JavaScript code on the web, I invariably find something foreign. I'm not saying it's bad -- just foreign for somebody who uses the language only occasionally. I don't believe JS should be a language only for "full-time JS programmers". I use 3 or 4 other languages regularly, so it's not nice when one language wants to hog my mental bandwidth (unfortunately C++ is one of those languages, so I know this problem well). It seems like everybody forgot what Crockford was saying back then? He talked a lot about the failed ES4 project (which ironically Graydon Hoare was a part of (?)). And ES5 was very restrained as a result, and I think mostly successful. It seemed this idea of restraint went completely out the door soon afterward, and nobody even remembers what was discussed 9 years ago. Crockford seems to have moved on (as well as Ryan Dahl). I haven't followed the JS language changes that closely, so I could be wrong, but I have the impression that it's completely changed. ----- I don't think I'm alone, as I remember that Bryan Cantrill recently said that "Brendan Eich never wrote a book about JS". In other words, the language was left without a founding philosophy. It's been an accretion of convenient features, some of which may be regretted in a couple years' time. There was a Strange Loop talk about this too regarding the lack of history/culture in JS. It seems like the same thing may have happened with Rust, since Graydon isn't an active contributor by his own admission.
- dccoolgai 8y ago
  Yeah, it definitely feels like ES6/7/Next is packed with features that theoretically make it a little faster to write code while making it monstrously slower and harder to read for at least 80% of practitioners... (destructuring comes to mind, with a syntax that is bafflingly similar to literal decs, that used to be the "good part") Seems like they made that choice every time. I was reserving my thoughts about ES6 until I worked with it for a while, but now that I have, I have to say for those reasons you cited I don't like it as much as ES5.
  - feanaro 8y ago
    Can you give an example of the aspect of restructuring you consider confusing?
    - zbentley 8y ago
      I'm not GP, but I believe they were referring to the fact that the syntax for destructuring is visually very similar to the syntax for object literals, which makes it easier to make mistakes while reading code in a hurry or as a newcomer to the language.
    - dccoolgai 8y ago
      "Confusing" is perhaps too harsh (although destructuring over several levels can be terribly confounding). By "hard to read" I mean primarily the fact that when you are "scanning" code, destructuring statements are syntactically way too similar to literal declarations. It severely degrades, IMHO, the speed with which you can effectively "scan" code in JS. It's not really that you _can't_ understand it when you slow down and analyze - it's that you _have to_ slow down to see the difference between "let a = [0,1]" and "let [,a] = [0,1]". Whereas in ES5, whenever you saw the brackets you could know without reading into the code there was an object or array being declared. That's not to say that I think destructuring is all bad - it certainly saves lines of code - but aftet working with it for a few years, I would gladly trade it back for more scannable code, easier syntax for beginners, etc.
- knowThySelfx 8y ago

Groxx 8y ago

JS especially has been a rocket-ship of new language features lately. It used to be my go-to language for new people since it was so simple (when used with a few boundaries (like every language needs)) that it could be picked up and the basics understood fairly quickly, and you can set people free to look at other people's code, and gradually learn DOM APIs and whatnot as needed. Not any more. Not even close. The amount of stuff you have to deal with immediately is far larger now. I actually miss the days when people added this kind of stuff to their transpiler of choice (e.g. coffeescript) and just used that - it doesn't need to be in the language, because it can never be removed from the language. Let fads appear and die outside that barrier, not inside.

dccoolgai 8y ago
Case in point the "how to deal with asynchronous stuff" problem. Callback pyramids weren't great, but the pastiche of approaches that followed (promises, generators, async functions, etc.) Is starting to feel worse.

chubot 8y ago

Yes, I think you could know "all of" of JavaScript in 2009, in the ES5 era. Does anyone even remember that anymore? I'm shocked at how much the language has changed. I was experimenting with server-side JS in 2009, before node.js was released, and I hacked on Brendan Eich's Narcissus interpreter, which gave me a good sense of the language. Now when I look at example JavaScript code on the web, I invariably find something foreign. I'm not saying it's bad -- just foreign for somebody who uses the language only occasionally. I don't believe JS should be a language only for "full-time JS programmers". I use 3 or 4 other languages regularly, so it's not nice when one language wants to hog my mental bandwidth (unfortunately C++ is one of those languages, so I know this problem well). It seems like everybody forgot what Crockford was saying back then? He talked a lot about the failed ES4 project (which ironically Graydon Hoare was a part of (?)). And ES5 was very restrained as a result, and I think mostly successful. It seemed this idea of restraint went completely out the door soon afterward, and nobody even remembers what was discussed 9 years ago. Crockford seems to have moved on (as well as Ryan Dahl). I haven't followed the JS language changes that closely, so I could be wrong, but I have the impression that it's completely changed. ----- I don't think I'm alone, as I remember that Bryan Cantrill recently said that "Brendan Eich never wrote a book about JS". In other words, the language was left without a founding philosophy. It's been an accretion of convenient features, some of which may be regretted in a couple years' time. There was a Strange Loop talk about this too regarding the lack of history/culture in JS. It seems like the same thing may have happened with Rust, since Graydon isn't an active contributor by his own admission.

dccoolgai 8y ago
Yeah, it definitely feels like ES6/7/Next is packed with features that theoretically make it a little faster to write code while making it monstrously slower and harder to read for at least 80% of practitioners... (destructuring comes to mind, with a syntax that is bafflingly similar to literal decs, that used to be the "good part") Seems like they made that choice every time. I was reserving my thoughts about ES6 until I worked with it for a while, but now that I have, I have to say for those reasons you cited I don't like it as much as ES5.
- feanaro 8y ago
  Can you give an example of the aspect of restructuring you consider confusing?
  - zbentley 8y ago
    I'm not GP, but I believe they were referring to the fact that the syntax for destructuring is visually very similar to the syntax for object literals, which makes it easier to make mistakes while reading code in a hurry or as a newcomer to the language.
  - dccoolgai 8y ago
    "Confusing" is perhaps too harsh (although destructuring over several levels can be terribly confounding). By "hard to read" I mean primarily the fact that when you are "scanning" code, destructuring statements are syntactically way too similar to literal declarations. It severely degrades, IMHO, the speed with which you can effectively "scan" code in JS. It's not really that you _can't_ understand it when you slow down and analyze - it's that you _have to_ slow down to see the difference between "let a = [0,1]" and "let [,a] = [0,1]". Whereas in ES5, whenever you saw the brackets you could know without reading into the code there was an object or array being declared. That's not to say that I think destructuring is all bad - it certainly saves lines of code - but aftet working with it for a few years, I would gladly trade it back for more scannable code, easier syntax for beginners, etc.
knowThySelfx 8y ago