4 ms·

English is bad. JavaScript is bad. US customary measurement system is bad. And you still have to deal with them all. This site is famously written in something

by vnchr 7y ago

English is bad. JavaScript is bad. US customary measurement system is bad. And you still have to deal with them all. This site is famously written in something cool that’s not JS (EDIT: I thought wrongly that it was Perl). Oh, what's that `hn.js` in the Sources? And you're back to using JavaScript. JavaScript may be bad, but you need us JS devs to do what we do. We are vital to the advancement of civilization as long as web browsers relying on JS are an essential platform for human communication. I recently started writing in Golang--it's great! Really enjoyable. The ecosystem is making me act like a better developer. Golang Is Good. But JavaScript, that's my job. JavaScript isn't going away. We are making it better. We are making better things with it. So "JavaScript Is Bad" all you want. You're still reliant upon it. It's still essential. It's still going to be the first programming language of many developers, especially the self-taught. JavaScript is eating the world. JavaScript Is Bad. And I'm a bad, bad man. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

tyingq 7y ago
"This site is famously written in Perl." HN? No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
- vnchr 7y ago
  Thanks! Correction attempted!
arethuza 7y ago
"This site is famously written in Perl." I think HN is actually written in ARC, which is a dialect of Lisp?
pessimizer 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
swalladge 7y ago
The sad thing is that we all chose to be content with a prototype built in 10 days rather than being patient and taking the time to develop a carefully designed solution. It's only now that it's something we are forced to use and put up with because the work required to develop and switch to something better (or even drop backwards compatibility to actually make javascript better) would be phenomenal.
- vnchr 7y ago
  That’s not reason enough for me to be sad! JavaScript makes me very glad. I’m having a great time with JavaScript!
boomlinde 7y ago
What is it that you are working on that is vital to the advancement of civilization?
lidHanteyk 7y ago
NoScript works fine on HN. Works fine on most of the Web, really; you'd be surprised. To dig a little into your mindset, it sounds like you enjoy being needed and having an important part to play. But you've limited yourself by tying yourself to JS and not embracing a wider understanding of computer science. JS is a portion of my salaried work as well. But that doesn't make it good. Plenty of salaried work is bad. It's up to us as ethical computer scientists to decide to avoid bad work, including deciding to avoid JS. At the end of the day, JS still doesn't even have integers. It's just as harmful to you as BASIC was to Dijkstra's students, and the damage done is so extensive that you're unable to notice how much you've been hurt. The only saving grace is that the ECMAScript steering committee has been infiltrated by capability-security folk and is slowly becoming a capability-aware language. You can't stop this, and you will be converted.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by vnchr 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago

"This site is famously written in Perl." HN? No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

vnchr 7y ago
Thanks! Correction attempted!

arethuza 7y ago

"This site is famously written in Perl." I think HN is actually written in ARC, which is a dialect of Lisp?

pessimizer 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

swalladge 7y ago

The sad thing is that we all chose to be content with a prototype built in 10 days rather than being patient and taking the time to develop a carefully designed solution. It's only now that it's something we are forced to use and put up with because the work required to develop and switch to something better (or even drop backwards compatibility to actually make javascript better) would be phenomenal.

vnchr 7y ago
That’s not reason enough for me to be sad! JavaScript makes me very glad. I’m having a great time with JavaScript!

boomlinde 7y ago

What is it that you are working on that is vital to the advancement of civilization?

lidHanteyk 7y ago

NoScript works fine on HN. Works fine on most of the Web, really; you'd be surprised. To dig a little into your mindset, it sounds like you enjoy being needed and having an important part to play. But you've limited yourself by tying yourself to JS and not embracing a wider understanding of computer science. JS is a portion of my salaried work as well. But that doesn't make it good. Plenty of salaried work is bad. It's up to us as ethical computer scientists to decide to avoid bad work, including deciding to avoid JS. At the end of the day, JS still doesn't even have integers. It's just as harmful to you as BASIC was to Dijkstra's students, and the damage done is so extensive that you're unable to notice how much you've been hurt. The only saving grace is that the ECMAScript steering committee has been infiltrated by capability-security folk and is slowly becoming a capability-aware language. You can't stop this, and you will be converted.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]