4 ms·

We are no longer in 2005. Javascript, especially in its Typescript flavor, is a perfectly capable modern language.

StillBored 6y ago
Its not that it isn't capable, its that it has more gocha's than most other languages of it size (and no, just because the gocha is well defined doesn't mean that it doesn't trip programmers up). Its also despite a couple decades of hard work by some very good compiler/JIT engineers at a considerable disadvantage perf wise to a lot of other languages. Third its most common runtime environment, is a poorly thought out collection DP and UI paradigms that don't scale to even late 1980's levels, leading to lots of crutches. (AKA, just how far down your average infinite scrolling web page can you go before your browser either takes 10s of seconds to update, or crashes?).
- alquemist 6y ago
  Regarding gotchas, it's bearable. I only have a couple on my short list: == vs === and xs.includes(x) vs x in xs, and only the latter is not reducible to a trivial rule of thumb. TS is helpful in this regard, possibly there are more in plain JS. Regarding performance, modern JS is plenty fast, but it's not in the 'terrible' category. It's memory usage, perhaps ;) https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/node-gpp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... For performance critical code JS is not the answer, but good enough for most uses, including UIs. Regarding UI paradigms, I'm not sure what the problem is, or what significantly better alternatives are. I did MFC/C++ in '90s and C++/Qt in the '00s, and both were vastly inferior to modern browser development. React+StyledComponents is a wonderful way to build UIs. There are some warts on the CSS side, but mostly because Stackoverflow is full of outdated advice.
  - jpcooper 6y ago
    Why are MFC and QT inferior to the Javascript way? I don’t know much about either.
    - alquemist 6y ago
      On top of my head: * Apps eventually degenerate in a mess of interconnected components triggering events on each other. Building UIs felt more like writing Verilog than writing functions. Nothing like chasing event ordering bugs through library components. With React I never saw 'enqueue a new event for component X' anti-pattern. All callbacks flow from children to parents in a fairly regular manner. * Related, there is no need to manually manage repaint events in React. Visual updates happen automagically. See, for example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/952906/how-do-i-call-paint-event https://stackoverflow.com/questions/952906/how-do-i-call-pai... for a hair pulling session related to manual repainting. * On the ergonomics side, having a markup language allows for terse but readable definitions of component trees. I see 2020 Qt has introduced a markup language, this was not the case circa 2005. * Hooks give an extra layer of niceness. Declaring a component is as easy as declaring a function. Local state becomes almost as simple as declaring a local variable. * The inspector capabilities of modern browsers are very handy when debugging layout and styling issues.
      - jpcooper 6y ago
        Thanks for the detailed explanation.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    MFC was a mess, In the 90's. I dabbled with MFC multiple times, mostly to support other peoples applications and it was overwhelmingly bad. For C++ I mostly just used the native win16/32 APIs because it turned out to be less kludgy for small GUI's associated with various services I was writting. OTOH, I did a _LOT_ of development with vb, and later delphi for the frontend of those services. Both of which were significantly better GUI development tools than visual studio at that point. I've since moved on to other development areas, but have done a bit of both JS (on and off from about 2005->2015), and a bit of QT here and there too. The latter seems to have gotten better in the past few releases AFAIK. C# is at least ok too. So in the case of MFC and early QT its not surprising that you prefer react+JS as neither of those were exactly the pinnacle of UI development in the late 1990's early 2000s. What you describe in a later posting about MFC was never really a problem with the VCL, pretty much no one dealt with repaint messages unless you were writing a custom component. I remember showing a number of MFC programmers BC++ builder (which is also still a thing) when they were singing the MFC tune. They tended to get really quite after that. PS/edit: Crazy, I just went and looked at the latest visual studio documentation and MFC is still an option, and at first glance seems basically the same as it was 25 years ago. Although the section on creating win32 applications is in front in the manual. I guess i'm not surprised that MFC is still a thing, but I am surprised that it doesn't have a giant depreciation warning. I frankly can't imagine creating a new MFC application in 2020.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
  Many of the gotchas wouldn't ever show up if only people committed to writing JS as sensibly as they write their programs in other languages when they're being forced to do things a certain way. But when it comes to JS and even other dynamic languages, people for some reason absolutely lose their minds, like a teenager whose parents are going out of town and are leaving them home by themselves overnight for the first time. I've seen horrendous JS from Java programmers, for example, that has made me think "Just... why? Why didn't you write the program you would have written (or already did write!) were you writing it in Java?" Like, "Yes, there are working JS programmers who do these kinds of zany things and make a real mess like this, but you don't have to, you know?" It's as if people are dead set on proving that they need the gutter bumpers and need to be sentenced to only playing rail shooters instead of the open world game, because they can't be trusted to behave responsibly otherwise. https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rrobbes/p/EMSE-features.pdf https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rrobbes/p/EMSE-features.pdf
  - leptons 6y ago
    Honestly this is really spot-on. I think part of the problem is people have heard that javascript is bad and just expect it to be bad, so they never really try to learn it and just copy and paste something that works and maybe expand on the bad examples when they should just be learning how to use javascript. Javascript requires some self-discipline, where other languages discipline you if you try to fuck things up yourself. It's kind of like a drunken sailor on leave going on a bender on-shore - the minute they leave the ship all bets are off. Some people just can't wrap their head around using weak/dynamic typing, because it loosens the rules. But that doesn't mean there aren't any rules. I code in a dozen other languages and Javascript is still my favorite because it's so easy to use, no boilerplate, and it doesn't give me any "gotchas" because javascript actually does follow some very basic easy to understand rules. The people that don't bother to learn those rules invariably shit on javascript. It's not fair, it's not real criticism. And practically all of the "examples" of bad javascript is almost always code that nobody should ever write, in any language, because it's just stupid to write code in those ways. But people think "aHa, aNoThEr 'gOtChA'" and the myth of javascript being somehow inferior continues. And to anyone who actually knows how easy javascript is to use, it just looks silly, pathetic, and obnoxious.

Its not that it isn't capable, its that it has more gocha's than most other languages of it size (and no, just because the gocha is well defined doesn't mean that it doesn't trip programmers up). Its also despite a couple decades of hard work by some very good compiler/JIT engineers at a considerable disadvantage perf wise to a lot of other languages. Third its most common runtime environment, is a poorly thought out collection DP and UI paradigms that don't scale to even late 1980's levels, leading to lots of crutches. (AKA, just how far down your average infinite scrolling web page can you go before your browser either takes 10s of seconds to update, or crashes?).

alquemist 6y ago
Regarding gotchas, it's bearable. I only have a couple on my short list: == vs === and xs.includes(x) vs x in xs, and only the latter is not reducible to a trivial rule of thumb. TS is helpful in this regard, possibly there are more in plain JS. Regarding performance, modern JS is plenty fast, but it's not in the 'terrible' category. It's memory usage, perhaps ;) https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/node-gpp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... For performance critical code JS is not the answer, but good enough for most uses, including UIs. Regarding UI paradigms, I'm not sure what the problem is, or what significantly better alternatives are. I did MFC/C++ in '90s and C++/Qt in the '00s, and both were vastly inferior to modern browser development. React+StyledComponents is a wonderful way to build UIs. There are some warts on the CSS side, but mostly because Stackoverflow is full of outdated advice.
- jpcooper 6y ago
  Why are MFC and QT inferior to the Javascript way? I don’t know much about either.
  - alquemist 6y ago
    On top of my head: * Apps eventually degenerate in a mess of interconnected components triggering events on each other. Building UIs felt more like writing Verilog than writing functions. Nothing like chasing event ordering bugs through library components. With React I never saw 'enqueue a new event for component X' anti-pattern. All callbacks flow from children to parents in a fairly regular manner. * Related, there is no need to manually manage repaint events in React. Visual updates happen automagically. See, for example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/952906/how-do-i-call-paint-event https://stackoverflow.com/questions/952906/how-do-i-call-pai... for a hair pulling session related to manual repainting. * On the ergonomics side, having a markup language allows for terse but readable definitions of component trees. I see 2020 Qt has introduced a markup language, this was not the case circa 2005. * Hooks give an extra layer of niceness. Declaring a component is as easy as declaring a function. Local state becomes almost as simple as declaring a local variable. * The inspector capabilities of modern browsers are very handy when debugging layout and styling issues.
    - jpcooper 6y ago
      Thanks for the detailed explanation.
- StillBored 6y ago
  MFC was a mess, In the 90's. I dabbled with MFC multiple times, mostly to support other peoples applications and it was overwhelmingly bad. For C++ I mostly just used the native win16/32 APIs because it turned out to be less kludgy for small GUI's associated with various services I was writting. OTOH, I did a _LOT_ of development with vb, and later delphi for the frontend of those services. Both of which were significantly better GUI development tools than visual studio at that point. I've since moved on to other development areas, but have done a bit of both JS (on and off from about 2005->2015), and a bit of QT here and there too. The latter seems to have gotten better in the past few releases AFAIK. C# is at least ok too. So in the case of MFC and early QT its not surprising that you prefer react+JS as neither of those were exactly the pinnacle of UI development in the late 1990's early 2000s. What you describe in a later posting about MFC was never really a problem with the VCL, pretty much no one dealt with repaint messages unless you were writing a custom component. I remember showing a number of MFC programmers BC++ builder (which is also still a thing) when they were singing the MFC tune. They tended to get really quite after that. PS/edit: Crazy, I just went and looked at the latest visual studio documentation and MFC is still an option, and at first glance seems basically the same as it was 25 years ago. Although the section on creating win32 applications is in front in the manual. I guess i'm not surprised that MFC is still a thing, but I am surprised that it doesn't have a giant depreciation warning. I frankly can't imagine creating a new MFC application in 2020.
pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
Many of the gotchas wouldn't ever show up if only people committed to writing JS as sensibly as they write their programs in other languages when they're being forced to do things a certain way. But when it comes to JS and even other dynamic languages, people for some reason absolutely lose their minds, like a teenager whose parents are going out of town and are leaving them home by themselves overnight for the first time. I've seen horrendous JS from Java programmers, for example, that has made me think "Just... why? Why didn't you write the program you would have written (or already did write!) were you writing it in Java?" Like, "Yes, there are working JS programmers who do these kinds of zany things and make a real mess like this, but you don't have to, you know?" It's as if people are dead set on proving that they need the gutter bumpers and need to be sentenced to only playing rail shooters instead of the open world game, because they can't be trusted to behave responsibly otherwise. https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rrobbes/p/EMSE-features.pdf https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rrobbes/p/EMSE-features.pdf
- leptons 6y ago
  Honestly this is really spot-on. I think part of the problem is people have heard that javascript is bad and just expect it to be bad, so they never really try to learn it and just copy and paste something that works and maybe expand on the bad examples when they should just be learning how to use javascript. Javascript requires some self-discipline, where other languages discipline you if you try to fuck things up yourself. It's kind of like a drunken sailor on leave going on a bender on-shore - the minute they leave the ship all bets are off. Some people just can't wrap their head around using weak/dynamic typing, because it loosens the rules. But that doesn't mean there aren't any rules. I code in a dozen other languages and Javascript is still my favorite because it's so easy to use, no boilerplate, and it doesn't give me any "gotchas" because javascript actually does follow some very basic easy to understand rules. The people that don't bother to learn those rules invariably shit on javascript. It's not fair, it's not real criticism. And practically all of the "examples" of bad javascript is almost always code that nobody should ever write, in any language, because it's just stupid to write code in those ways. But people think "aHa, aNoThEr 'gOtChA'" and the myth of javascript being somehow inferior continues. And to anyone who actually knows how easy javascript is to use, it just looks silly, pathetic, and obnoxious.