3 ms·

I'm starting to think the entire direction of modern Javascript is one giant yak-shave built on enabling bad decisions. "I like functional programming so I'm g

I'm starting to think the entire direction of modern Javascript is one giant yak-shave built on enabling bad decisions. "I like functional programming so I'm going to do that in JavaScript" -> "Now I have a problem because JavaScript is not very good at that, so now let's radically alter JavaScript until it's... well, still not good at it, but it looks like it is, at a glance" (initially through libraries, now altering the language itself) "Let's make as many calls async by default as possible" -> "Oh but actually I need most of them to seem synchronous, even if they're actually async, like 90+% of the time" -> "Callbacks?" -> "Oh god that sucked... promises?" -> "Better but still not great, let's just... uh... add `async` and `await` and watch as their use becomes so hilariously common that it's now painfully obvious that the default behavior is wrong?"

shadowgovt 4y ago
> watch as their use becomes so hilariously common that it's now painfully obvious that the default behavior is wrong Hm. :) Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps "synchronous" was a bad default for a language embedded in an application space where the lifeblood is "network communications over unreliable channels." Still, seemed a good idea at the time(1) (1) ... at the time, they were doing a cute tech demo, there were alternative scripting languages under consideration, and I don't think anyone expected JavaScript to blow up to become the only viable option.