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I'm a JS dev and I love it, but JavaScript is to programming languages what the electric guitar is to musical instruments. It's the thing that attracts a lot o

I'm a JS dev and I love it, but JavaScript is to programming languages what the electric guitar is to musical instruments. It's the thing that attracts a lot of new beginners who may or may not be interested in the more serious theory that makes programming what it is.

rxhernandez 7y ago
Have you worked in other languages for substantial amounts of time?
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  I did Objective C for about 1-2 years, and a bit of java over the years. But no, not really.
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    Fair enough. Thank you for taking the time to a question that, in retrospect, sounds antagonistic (apologies for that).
    - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
      Nah, I didn't take it that way
- celim307 7y ago
  I used kotlin, golang, and ruby for multiple. not a huge sample of languages but i still like es6 javascript the best
- filoleg 7y ago
  Yep. Python for many years, Java+TurboPascal+C# for a couple of years, C+Matlab for a bit under a year, and a few other ones that I wouldn't list simply due to how little work I've done in those. TypeScript and Python (with typehints) are the current favorites. Golang seems to be getting up there for me too, but I don't have enough experience with it to actually be able to say that.
_bxg1 7y ago
Agreed. I've gotten to where I don't like it as much for really large projects - TypeScript helps a bunch but is inherently limited by aspects of JS itself - but there is absolutely no language I'd rather sketch something out in. The core data types actually strike a really excellent balance between representing the major distinct paradigms (named collections, unnamed collections, strings, numbers, booleans) while giving you maximum flexibility within them. Its standard library - array functions in particular - has become very mature. FP and OOP concepts are both quite well-supported, and doing async stuff (client or server or otherwise) with promises just smashes every other language I've used in terms of ergonomics. Much of the above could be said about Python too, but regardless.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  Yeah definitely, it's amazing for scratching together ideas. Though at a certain scale, it starts to feel pretty fragile. I don't have much experience with other languages but the explicit interface/implementation paradigm that Objective C used was so amazing to me (as someone who started out in JS). I find myself missing it every now and then, especially for large projects.
marshray 7y ago
Also, it's used with high levels of added distortion.

rxhernandez 7y ago

Have you worked in other languages for substantial amounts of time?

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
I did Objective C for about 1-2 years, and a bit of java over the years. But no, not really.
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  Fair enough. Thank you for taking the time to a question that, in retrospect, sounds antagonistic (apologies for that).
  - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
    Nah, I didn't take it that way
celim307 7y ago
I used kotlin, golang, and ruby for multiple. not a huge sample of languages but i still like es6 javascript the best
filoleg 7y ago
Yep. Python for many years, Java+TurboPascal+C# for a couple of years, C+Matlab for a bit under a year, and a few other ones that I wouldn't list simply due to how little work I've done in those. TypeScript and Python (with typehints) are the current favorites. Golang seems to be getting up there for me too, but I don't have enough experience with it to actually be able to say that.

_bxg1 7y ago

Agreed. I've gotten to where I don't like it as much for really large projects - TypeScript helps a bunch but is inherently limited by aspects of JS itself - but there is absolutely no language I'd rather sketch something out in. The core data types actually strike a really excellent balance between representing the major distinct paradigms (named collections, unnamed collections, strings, numbers, booleans) while giving you maximum flexibility within them. Its standard library - array functions in particular - has become very mature. FP and OOP concepts are both quite well-supported, and doing async stuff (client or server or otherwise) with promises just smashes every other language I've used in terms of ergonomics. Much of the above could be said about Python too, but regardless.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
Yeah definitely, it's amazing for scratching together ideas. Though at a certain scale, it starts to feel pretty fragile. I don't have much experience with other languages but the explicit interface/implementation paradigm that Objective C used was so amazing to me (as someone who started out in JS). I find myself missing it every now and then, especially for large projects.

marshray 7y ago

Also, it's used with high levels of added distortion.