4 ms·

Also, I feel like a lot of fullstack JS is written by people who started with frontend JS and don't have nearly enough backend experience

troad 5mo ago
I came from systems programming, so I think half of what happens in JS is nuts.
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  A lot of JS is nuts, but most of its basic behaviour that makes it not a good backend language make it an alright scripting language for the web specifically. I wish we would've used something tcl-y instead though, it's much cleaner and the "everything is a string"-ness makes sense for a fundamentally text based medium (the web)
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    If you drop-in replaced JS today with Lua, you'd have a conceptually similar language with a lot of warts chopped off. Backend devs can just cope with 1-based indexing though.
sph 5mo ago
JS programmers today are the PHP programmers of 25 years ago. Remember how many SQL injection bugs there was at the time? Little Bobby Tables remembers. The standards haven't changed; for the vast majority of JS programmers, this is their first programming language and they have no solid foundation of architecture and security. So what you get are these overly enthusiastic newbies that want to share their latest achievement with the world (say, a function to left pad a string), and why not include a fancy post-install script with emojis that makes adoption even simpler for other complete noobs? And this is the result.
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  And before PHP it was Visual Basic, and COBOL even further back. I'm convinced trying to teach people to program without them understanding the basics of how computers work will lead to this.
  - okanat 5mo ago
    It is not about not teaching them, I am co-graduated with many people who do YOLO JS and AI slop right now. They had to pass the same architecture and microprocessor programming lectures. Educated or not, there are many programmers who simply don't give a fuck. Unless you make all the IT jobs a regulated profession and enforce significant yearly recertification, the mediocres will dominate. You cannot be nice and inclusive to mediocre programmers and expect good baselines.
    - troad 5mo ago
      > Unless you make all the IT jobs a regulated profession and enforce significant yearly recertification, the mediocres will dominate. This would merely optimise the industry for people who are good at wiggling through bureaucratic hurdles. It would entrench mediocrity while lopping off the extreme ends of the skill distribution - on both ends.
- erikerikson 5mo ago
  I wrote a little PHP about 25 years ago and hated it, dropped it like a rock as soon as it wasn't my job. Before that basic, assembly, c, and c++. Then scheme, C#, Java, prolog, and others too minor to mention before I started using nodejs. My last company I chose full stack Typescript and it was great. There's a lot to love and a plenty to avoid. You're not wrong that there's a lot of crap, a massive legacy, and some bad behavior. It is also approachable, flexible, and portable. Even if you sometimes need to say "Wat?!?"

troad 5mo ago

I came from systems programming, so I think half of what happens in JS is nuts.

mghackerlady 5mo ago
A lot of JS is nuts, but most of its basic behaviour that makes it not a good backend language make it an alright scripting language for the web specifically. I wish we would've used something tcl-y instead though, it's much cleaner and the "everything is a string"-ness makes sense for a fundamentally text based medium (the web)
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  If you drop-in replaced JS today with Lua, you'd have a conceptually similar language with a lot of warts chopped off. Backend devs can just cope with 1-based indexing though.

sph 5mo ago

JS programmers today are the PHP programmers of 25 years ago. Remember how many SQL injection bugs there was at the time? Little Bobby Tables remembers. The standards haven't changed; for the vast majority of JS programmers, this is their first programming language and they have no solid foundation of architecture and security. So what you get are these overly enthusiastic newbies that want to share their latest achievement with the world (say, a function to left pad a string), and why not include a fancy post-install script with emojis that makes adoption even simpler for other complete noobs? And this is the result.

mghackerlady 5mo ago
And before PHP it was Visual Basic, and COBOL even further back. I'm convinced trying to teach people to program without them understanding the basics of how computers work will lead to this.
- okanat 5mo ago
  It is not about not teaching them, I am co-graduated with many people who do YOLO JS and AI slop right now. They had to pass the same architecture and microprocessor programming lectures. Educated or not, there are many programmers who simply don't give a fuck. Unless you make all the IT jobs a regulated profession and enforce significant yearly recertification, the mediocres will dominate. You cannot be nice and inclusive to mediocre programmers and expect good baselines.
  - troad 5mo ago
    > Unless you make all the IT jobs a regulated profession and enforce significant yearly recertification, the mediocres will dominate. This would merely optimise the industry for people who are good at wiggling through bureaucratic hurdles. It would entrench mediocrity while lopping off the extreme ends of the skill distribution - on both ends.
erikerikson 5mo ago
I wrote a little PHP about 25 years ago and hated it, dropped it like a rock as soon as it wasn't my job. Before that basic, assembly, c, and c++. Then scheme, C#, Java, prolog, and others too minor to mention before I started using nodejs. My last company I chose full stack Typescript and it was great. There's a lot to love and a plenty to avoid. You're not wrong that there's a lot of crap, a massive legacy, and some bad behavior. It is also approachable, flexible, and portable. Even if you sometimes need to say "Wat?!?"