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Every time this is mentioned, the person is heavily downvoted. But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. In fact, this very article star

Every time this is mentioned, the person is heavily downvoted. But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. In fact, this very article starts with "JavaScript, the undisputed king of web development, is being sabotaged — not by a rival language or a revolutionary new technology, but by its own baggage from the past.". That's the first sentence. Nobody wanted to work with JS, it was used to make snowflakes on your home page on Xmas at best. Then things like gmail happened (using GWT!), and the web became the most awesome platform in the world. By then it was too late, JS was the de facto language of the coolest tech of human history. It was such a trap Google spent billions and hired the best minds out there to make chrome, with a VM that could execute it fast enough, so the company could make its vision happen. At the time, JS was a nuisance and an embarrassment, something we had to deal with. The "good parts" was the bible because it's a language you could only use if you ignore half of it. Case in point, the most popular JS techs created after that existed precisely to avoid writing ES5. Like coffeescript, babel, webpack, etc. JS is a decent language now, because the community invested so much into it. Provided you use tooling. A lot of it. But that's not how it started. We were forced to use it, and had to spend considerable resources to make up for how bad it was. I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. Electron, unfortunately, might take a chunk of that choice, because once again, the browser platform is that great.

preommr 3y ago
> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. That was 23 years ago. It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult. > I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. I would. Typescript is easily the best language for anything from app development to small projects and has been for years now. If you're bringing up Go/Rust, then TS has been incredibly good in that timeframe. Before that there was Pythong+Django and Ruby/RoR back when we did SSR, and Java applets or flash before that.
- recursive 3y ago
  >> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. > That was 23 years ago. > It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult. And yet, it's no less true. Regarding typescript, that's just, like, your opinion man. I mean, I think typescript is pretty good, especially given that its tied to the design choices of javascript, but objectively the best language. That's way too far.
MBCook 3y ago
You’re not wrong at all. But the parent lost complaining that JS exists at all is not really productive to a discussion about what effects JS today. The “JS should have been something else” ship sailed a VERY long time ago. It’s like people who go into C++ threads and complain it wasn’t rust from the start. That’s nice. But rust wasn’t there at the time. It’s not useful for discussion.
gochi 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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briantakita 3y ago
> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. Pleased to meet you! Isomorphic code bases are a case to use a single language, which before WASM, is Javascript & Typescript. I may prefer to use something different with WASM, which has even more interoperability than JS, becoming a bigger part of the ecosystem, but so far it would be Assemblyscript to more easily migrate my existing codebase. Assemblyscript has a Garbage Collector, so I may choose Rust or Zig if I don't want the GC. Rust probably has the most momentum, so despite the complexities, verbosity, & loss of productivity working with Rust, that may be a better choice when working with WASM. I would prefer Zig over Rust & Assemblyscript over both in cases of app development...but breadth & depth of the ecosystem matters. I wouldn't touch PHP, Python, Ruby if I had a between using Typescript...as PHP, Python, & Ruby lack a decent static type system. > Nobody wanted to work with JS, it was used to make snowflakes on your home page on Xmas at best. I disagree. Javascript is a prototype based language, which provided opportunities for composition over inheritance. JS supported closures from it's beginning while other popular languages did not (well Ruby had limited support for closures). Inheritance & other OO concepts now considered harmful were prevalent with Java, C#, Ruby, Python, etc. Sure, we could have used LISP instead, but for some reason LISP did not gain traction. JS was the closest programming to LISP which had popular appeal. I suggest that JS changed the general programming ecosystem in profoundly positive ways & I, for one, preferred developing in JS over the other popular alternatives when I could. To further bolster the case for JS, Typescript was built as an extension on top of JS, proving you can have the dynamic prototype based runtime with a powerful static type system.
no_wizard 3y ago
I'd willing work on it nowadays, Node is really fast. Deno is really fast too, and TypeScript makes it pretty amazing to work with. I think the ecosystem needs love again, because outside of Fastify I feel like server side JavaScript that isn't targeting a Lambda or Cloudflare worker type environment is a little spare of good options. That said, Fastify is pretty amazing, and if you use graphql the main GQL servers are usually Apollo (JS based) or GraphQL Yoga (Also JS based), and they're really good. One area that intensive JavaScript needs work on though is Machine Learning / Scientific computing. `number`, `BigInt` and `Math` aren't enough here. We need more built-ins added to the language around this (particularly around `Math`) IMO
postmodest 3y ago
The most telling part of this comment is that you omitted PHP. And the parent comment mentioning VBScript is the other half. VBScript was equally terrible. Imagine a world where every interpreted runtime used Lisp. Or UCSD Pascal. People would be here saying "this was forced on us!" And wishing that browsers ran MIPS assembler they could target with their new language of choice.
cypress66 3y ago
> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. You probably haven't met many people. For backend you can choose any language, yet a lot of people (with knowledge of many languages) choose JS/TS. I'm one of those. I enjoy TS more than python.
deleted 3y ago
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preommr 3y ago

> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. That was 23 years ago. It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult. > I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. I would. Typescript is easily the best language for anything from app development to small projects and has been for years now. If you're bringing up Go/Rust, then TS has been incredibly good in that timeframe. Before that there was Pythong+Django and Ruby/RoR back when we did SSR, and Java applets or flash before that.

recursive 3y ago
>> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened. > That was 23 years ago. > It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult. And yet, it's no less true. Regarding typescript, that's just, like, your opinion man. I mean, I think typescript is pretty good, especially given that its tied to the design choices of javascript, but objectively the best language. That's way too far.

MBCook 3y ago

You’re not wrong at all. But the parent lost complaining that JS exists at all is not really productive to a discussion about what effects JS today. The “JS should have been something else” ship sailed a VERY long time ago. It’s like people who go into C++ threads and complain it wasn’t rust from the start. That’s nice. But rust wasn’t there at the time. It’s not useful for discussion.

gochi 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

briantakita 3y ago

> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. Pleased to meet you! Isomorphic code bases are a case to use a single language, which before WASM, is Javascript & Typescript. I may prefer to use something different with WASM, which has even more interoperability than JS, becoming a bigger part of the ecosystem, but so far it would be Assemblyscript to more easily migrate my existing codebase. Assemblyscript has a Garbage Collector, so I may choose Rust or Zig if I don't want the GC. Rust probably has the most momentum, so despite the complexities, verbosity, & loss of productivity working with Rust, that may be a better choice when working with WASM. I would prefer Zig over Rust & Assemblyscript over both in cases of app development...but breadth & depth of the ecosystem matters. I wouldn't touch PHP, Python, Ruby if I had a between using Typescript...as PHP, Python, & Ruby lack a decent static type system. > Nobody wanted to work with JS, it was used to make snowflakes on your home page on Xmas at best. I disagree. Javascript is a prototype based language, which provided opportunities for composition over inheritance. JS supported closures from it's beginning while other popular languages did not (well Ruby had limited support for closures). Inheritance & other OO concepts now considered harmful were prevalent with Java, C#, Ruby, Python, etc. Sure, we could have used LISP instead, but for some reason LISP did not gain traction. JS was the closest programming to LISP which had popular appeal. I suggest that JS changed the general programming ecosystem in profoundly positive ways & I, for one, preferred developing in JS over the other popular alternatives when I could. To further bolster the case for JS, Typescript was built as an extension on top of JS, proving you can have the dynamic prototype based runtime with a powerful static type system.

no_wizard 3y ago

I'd willing work on it nowadays, Node is really fast. Deno is really fast too, and TypeScript makes it pretty amazing to work with. I think the ecosystem needs love again, because outside of Fastify I feel like server side JavaScript that isn't targeting a Lambda or Cloudflare worker type environment is a little spare of good options. That said, Fastify is pretty amazing, and if you use graphql the main GQL servers are usually Apollo (JS based) or GraphQL Yoga (Also JS based), and they're really good. One area that intensive JavaScript needs work on though is Machine Learning / Scientific computing. `number`, `BigInt` and `Math` aren't enough here. We need more built-ins added to the language around this (particularly around `Math`) IMO

postmodest 3y ago

The most telling part of this comment is that you omitted PHP. And the parent comment mentioning VBScript is the other half. VBScript was equally terrible. Imagine a world where every interpreted runtime used Lisp. Or UCSD Pascal. People would be here saying "this was forced on us!" And wishing that browsers ran MIPS assembler they could target with their new language of choice.

cypress66 3y ago

> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice. You probably haven't met many people. For backend you can choose any language, yet a lot of people (with knowledge of many languages) choose JS/TS. I'm one of those. I enjoy TS more than python.

deleted 3y ago

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