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Yep. I am just wondering if the paradigm of JS being asynchronous is just not worth the added effort in code complexity and all the workarounds that have had to

by trog 5y ago

Yep. I am just wondering if the paradigm of JS being asynchronous is just not worth the added effort in code complexity and all the workarounds that have had to be added in over the years to try to make it manageable. I personally find it a chore to work in JS compared to other languages that work the opposite way - everything is synchronous and things become a chore when you want to deal with async stuff. Again I have limited JS experience and have never enjoyed working with it (I just am not interested in front end stuff) so I'm sure it's stuff people get used to.

noahtallen 5y ago
Could you clarify what the paradigm of JS being asynchronous means? Usually, async calls are actually “async” in that you’re doing a network request or something actually asynchronous. The reason they have to be async is that you cannot just block all execution or else other things can’t happen while the network request is happening. Which means your entire application grinds to a halt. Other languages solve this in a similar way IMO, with async/await and actual threads. JS doesn’t have threads, so you can’t fork a process to handle network stuff apart from UI. I personally think that async/await is a lot more straightforward to use than forming a process. Additionally, async/await allows you to wait when you need to. You don’t have to await a promise — you can just call it, and then it will work in the background. You’ll just not be able to respond when it finishes work. (Because you aren’t “wait”ing for it.) What are some other examples with easier async in other languages? I’m just confused what you’re trying to get at. Everything in JS is synchronous. You only have async when you have async. Which is a lot, because a lot of stuff in the web is async.
- trog 5y ago
  Yep, sorry & thanks for your polite post in response to my basically unhinged ramblings (late night after a tough week, always a bad time to try to do anything). The poster jmull above basically wrote[1] what I was trying to say much more succinctly; this other post[2] is also more clear. Really I was just being snarky about the idea of shell scripting where you have to type 'await' in front of every command you want to run in a three-line file, like in the examples presented for this tool. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27080734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27080734 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27077752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27077752

by trog 5y ago

noahtallen 5y ago

Could you clarify what the paradigm of JS being asynchronous means? Usually, async calls are actually “async” in that you’re doing a network request or something actually asynchronous. The reason they have to be async is that you cannot just block all execution or else other things can’t happen while the network request is happening. Which means your entire application grinds to a halt. Other languages solve this in a similar way IMO, with async/await and actual threads. JS doesn’t have threads, so you can’t fork a process to handle network stuff apart from UI. I personally think that async/await is a lot more straightforward to use than forming a process. Additionally, async/await allows you to wait when you need to. You don’t have to await a promise — you can just call it, and then it will work in the background. You’ll just not be able to respond when it finishes work. (Because you aren’t “wait”ing for it.) What are some other examples with easier async in other languages? I’m just confused what you’re trying to get at. Everything in JS is synchronous. You only have async when you have async. Which is a lot, because a lot of stuff in the web is async.

trog 5y ago
Yep, sorry & thanks for your polite post in response to my basically unhinged ramblings (late night after a tough week, always a bad time to try to do anything). The poster jmull above basically wrote[1] what I was trying to say much more succinctly; this other post[2] is also more clear. Really I was just being snarky about the idea of shell scripting where you have to type 'await' in front of every command you want to run in a three-line file, like in the examples presented for this tool. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27080734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27080734 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27077752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27077752