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Calling it "trash" is a very inflammatory way to describe one the most popular programming languages in the world. Language like that is against the HN guidelin

Calling it "trash" is a very inflammatory way to describe one the most popular programming languages in the world. Language like that is against the HN guidelines, because it distracts from your argument to debate about whether JS is "trash" or not. JavaScript has a bunch of quirks, but it's still great. In the StackOverflow survey, JS reliably ranks highly in the list of "most loved" languages. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-languages-loved https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo... Node.js is a thing because people liked JS so much that they wanted to use it on the server side. You may think they're all fools, but it's actually pretty nice. I like the latest version of Node better than working in Python (mostly because node_modules are better than virtualenvs, IMO.) You can use TypeScript to address many of the quirks described in TFA, but you can also reliably avoid them just by never using == and always preferring ===, using String() before using + to concatenate, and using Number() before subtracting. I basically never encounter situations like the ones depicted in TFA in real code, because I never try to add two arrays or subtract two strings or what have you.

wruza 5y ago
Trash “Admitting like this has a bunch of quirks, but it’s still great.” (not arguing for it though) Criticism is a driving force behind change to the better. Calling something “great” without pointing out great sides I find… pointless and harmful. To name a few great points, distinct from other languages: JS has a pretty shameless object model, where you (usually) have ordered keys, and every key is a property with an {enumerable, writable, configurable, get, set} descriptor. It is much more usable and practical than in almost all other languages. (They do that for “efficiency”, but that’s non-sequitur) JS has very useful destructuring syntax, which many languages lack of and that leads to assignment bloating and boredom. Also, jit optimizes out temporary objects, so foo({x, y}) / function foo({x, y}) works almost at the same speed as foo(x, y). JS has a nice Function type, which allows easier metaprogramming and substitution of ‘this’ object. Functions are objects, so you can function foo() {}; foo.x = 1; console.log(foo.name, foo.x). JS bare objects may have methods and properties: t={_x:1, get_x(){return this._x}, …} JS doesn’t treat syntactic lists in a last-value-only way, so you can expect foo(…a, …b, c) to work, and to work as intended. E.g. Lua cannot do that, and python (afair) requires you to collect items into a single array (not sure, correct me if I’m wrong). But what people usually mean by “great” is “it generally works”. I know it is an american thing, but some aspects of js, including those you meet everyday, are really just trashy. It would be nice to not have them at all.

wruza 5y ago

Trash “Admitting like this has a bunch of quirks, but it’s still great.” (not arguing for it though) Criticism is a driving force behind change to the better. Calling something “great” without pointing out great sides I find… pointless and harmful. To name a few great points, distinct from other languages: JS has a pretty shameless object model, where you (usually) have ordered keys, and every key is a property with an {enumerable, writable, configurable, get, set} descriptor. It is much more usable and practical than in almost all other languages. (They do that for “efficiency”, but that’s non-sequitur) JS has very useful destructuring syntax, which many languages lack of and that leads to assignment bloating and boredom. Also, jit optimizes out temporary objects, so foo({x, y}) / function foo({x, y}) works almost at the same speed as foo(x, y). JS has a nice Function type, which allows easier metaprogramming and substitution of ‘this’ object. Functions are objects, so you can function foo() {}; foo.x = 1; console.log(foo.name, foo.x). JS bare objects may have methods and properties: t={_x:1, get_x(){return this._x}, …} JS doesn’t treat syntactic lists in a last-value-only way, so you can expect foo(…a, …b, c) to work, and to work as intended. E.g. Lua cannot do that, and python (afair) requires you to collect items into a single array (not sure, correct me if I’m wrong). But what people usually mean by “great” is “it generally works”. I know it is an american thing, but some aspects of js, including those you meet everyday, are really just trashy. It would be nice to not have them at all.