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> a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters >Guy must be having a bad day. He wa

> a guy across the room suddenly stood up, walked over to the white board, and wrote "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters >Guy must be having a bad day. He was having a bad day because he was doing stupid things with the code he wrote that led to problems. I've never had a problem with Javascript's type system, or having the wrong type show up where it shouldn't. I accepted the dynamic nature of JS long ago when it first came out in Netscape, and I adjusted my coding style accordingly. And Javascript types are not a mystery, type coercion is fairly simple and doesn't produce unexpected results if you actually understand the language. If you don't understand the language (or any programming language), then writing things like "F*CK JAVASCRIPT" in massive letters on a whiteboard is something that might happen.

tstrimple 4y ago
> I've never had a problem with Javascript's type system, or having the wrong type show up where it shouldn't. I accepted the dynamic nature of JS long ago when it first came out in Netscape, and I adjusted my coding style accordingly Different languages have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as generally accepted coding practices and sometimes different paradigms. I find the folks who struggle the most are trying to write JS as if they are still a C# or Java developer so they constantly run into square peg round hole issues and blame it on the tool. I love JavaScript. I also love C#. But you've got to approach how you solve problems with them differently. How you write long term maintainable code in both is different.
- cxr 3y ago
  > I find the folks who struggle the most are trying to write JS as if they are still a C# or Java developer so they constantly run into square peg round hole issues and blame it on the tool. I love JavaScript. I also love C#. But you've got to approach how you solve problems with them differently. How you write long term maintainable code in both is different. Weird take. Because the best way to write maintainable JS by far, whether you're using TypeScript to enforce it or not, is to keep all the lessons that informed the design of Java in your heart. Go ahead and decompose your program into classes and interfaces, eschew with clever tricks and just focus on readable code instead, and make sure you or anyone else can without much difficulty work out at any given point what the "shape" (type) of a value is.
krapp 4y ago
Yeah, Javascript isn't even the only dynamically typed language out there, but you don't see people compiling strictly typed supersets of Python or Lisp because they consider those languages unusable otherwise. With any other language people are willing to learn the idioms and accept and work with the quirks, but for some reason Javascript alone seems to be the exception.
- schwartzworld 4y ago
  Didn't python add static typing?
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Only type hints. They help a linter/IDE bitch about types but they don't have any enforcement beyond that. They're great for self documenting methods but don't remove any dynamic typing from the language itself.
    - jcparkyn 3y ago
      I'd argue that typescript is the same, just stricter by default if using TSC. Many people run type checking separately from building/running the code, just like in python.
fulafel 4y ago
There are lots of well-liked dynamic languages. But JS deserves the bad rap, it has so many WTFs in it's dynamic behavior and as a rule doesn't raise errors when things go sideways. Just painting it as a dynamic vs static thing is misleading.

tstrimple 4y ago

> I've never had a problem with Javascript's type system, or having the wrong type show up where it shouldn't. I accepted the dynamic nature of JS long ago when it first came out in Netscape, and I adjusted my coding style accordingly Different languages have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as generally accepted coding practices and sometimes different paradigms. I find the folks who struggle the most are trying to write JS as if they are still a C# or Java developer so they constantly run into square peg round hole issues and blame it on the tool. I love JavaScript. I also love C#. But you've got to approach how you solve problems with them differently. How you write long term maintainable code in both is different.

cxr 3y ago
> I find the folks who struggle the most are trying to write JS as if they are still a C# or Java developer so they constantly run into square peg round hole issues and blame it on the tool. I love JavaScript. I also love C#. But you've got to approach how you solve problems with them differently. How you write long term maintainable code in both is different. Weird take. Because the best way to write maintainable JS by far, whether you're using TypeScript to enforce it or not, is to keep all the lessons that informed the design of Java in your heart. Go ahead and decompose your program into classes and interfaces, eschew with clever tricks and just focus on readable code instead, and make sure you or anyone else can without much difficulty work out at any given point what the "shape" (type) of a value is.

krapp 4y ago

Yeah, Javascript isn't even the only dynamically typed language out there, but you don't see people compiling strictly typed supersets of Python or Lisp because they consider those languages unusable otherwise. With any other language people are willing to learn the idioms and accept and work with the quirks, but for some reason Javascript alone seems to be the exception.

schwartzworld 4y ago
Didn't python add static typing?
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Only type hints. They help a linter/IDE bitch about types but they don't have any enforcement beyond that. They're great for self documenting methods but don't remove any dynamic typing from the language itself.
  - jcparkyn 3y ago
    I'd argue that typescript is the same, just stricter by default if using TSC. Many people run type checking separately from building/running the code, just like in python.

fulafel 4y ago

There are lots of well-liked dynamic languages. But JS deserves the bad rap, it has so many WTFs in it's dynamic behavior and as a rule doesn't raise errors when things go sideways. Just painting it as a dynamic vs static thing is misleading.