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C and Javascript are both worse-is-better languages, as is SQL. They have known gotchas and quirks and lots of them. But they basically work, they were good e
by nostrademons 3y ago
C and Javascript are both worse-is-better languages, as is SQL. They have known gotchas and quirks and lots of them. But they basically work, they were good enough, and because of that they became so ubiquitous that it's impossible to replace them.
- 59nadir 3y agoThey were both THE languages of systems that became/were important. I agree that they both have the "worse-is-better" quality about them, but C is a much more appropriate language for what it's supposed to do than JavaScript is. The fact that we (mostly) haven't been able to execute anything else reasonably in the browser is the reason why it's stuck with us. C has had alternatives for a long time but stays put, because it's just better at what it does.
- revelio 3y agoNot ... really. Those languages all became popular and got critical mass because they were the only way to access operating systems-like things. People wanted the value provided by those platforms and had to go through the language to get at them. So they buckled up, tolerated it and promptly spent decades and billions of dollars on creating wrappers, FFIs, transpilers and the like to avoid having to touch the underlying monopoly language. People wanted browsers. JS came along for the ride. It wouldn't have been so popular if it had lived its life outside the browser
- kqr 3y agoThat's exactly how worse-is-better works. You're not doing it well, but you're consistently showing up in the right place and interoperate well with the things people want to use so they are forced to get to know you.