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While I think I understand you, and maybe a little sympathetic to keeping the language little, I simply cannot agree because what you said is basically contradi

by wyuenho 14y ago

While I think I understand you, and maybe a little sympathetic to keeping the language little, I simply cannot agree because what you said is basically contradictory. It's same old argument I guess, but MIPS is simple and consists of only very few instructions. Are you going to program in MIPS everyday? The same argument goes for JS. JS is too little in terms of functionality, so it requires lots of ceremony to write common idioms that other languages have had for decades. Javascript is a terrible language as it stands now, but its adoption and usage has matured enough that there's a lot less risk in pissing people off by adding syntactic sugar on idioms that people already use. I actually welcome these ES6 additions wholeheartedly.

benihana 14y ago
That's a terrible analogy. JS is small and simple but it's far far far more powerful and friendly than MIPS. What functionality is missing from JavaScript that needs to be supplemented by the things outlined in this post? What kind of things are you doing that "require a lot of ceremony?"
- wyuenho 14y ago
  Scoping. Would you like to type this? var myModule = (function(root){ var lib = {}; root.lib = lib; return lib; }(this)); Or this? module myModule = { export //blah blah blah } Data structures. There's not map or set in JS even to this day that actually acts like a map or set you've learned in your data structure class. Object literal is a poor substitution for a map.
angersock 14y ago
So, the proper argument here would be in support of something like CoffeeScript which compiles to JS, much as we would expect C compilers to generate our MIPS code for us. My concern is basically born out of my background using C++; a lot of very well-meaning additions have been made over time to that language, and now it's so sprawly that using it at different shops is annoying. C++ these days is basically begging to be replaced by C with bindings to a scripting engine, because it's too damned unwieldy for most other purposes (the joke goes, everybody uses a different 90% of the features). I'm just concerned that JavaScript, an elegant if flawed little language, is going to get enterprisified by well-meaning developers who lack foresight and who haven't learned from others.

by wyuenho 14y ago

benihana 14y ago

That's a terrible analogy. JS is small and simple but it's far far far more powerful and friendly than MIPS. What functionality is missing from JavaScript that needs to be supplemented by the things outlined in this post? What kind of things are you doing that "require a lot of ceremony?"

wyuenho 14y ago
Scoping. Would you like to type this? var myModule = (function(root){ var lib = {}; root.lib = lib; return lib; }(this)); Or this? module myModule = { export //blah blah blah } Data structures. There's not map or set in JS even to this day that actually acts like a map or set you've learned in your data structure class. Object literal is a poor substitution for a map.

angersock 14y ago

So, the proper argument here would be in support of something like CoffeeScript which compiles to JS, much as we would expect C compilers to generate our MIPS code for us. My concern is basically born out of my background using C++; a lot of very well-meaning additions have been made over time to that language, and now it's so sprawly that using it at different shops is annoying. C++ these days is basically begging to be replaced by C with bindings to a scripting engine, because it's too damned unwieldy for most other purposes (the joke goes, everybody uses a different 90% of the features). I'm just concerned that JavaScript, an elegant if flawed little language, is going to get enterprisified by well-meaning developers who lack foresight and who haven't learned from others.