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Completely agree, and I say this having written mostly JavaScript professionally for the last several years. It's sad to think of the millions of engineer-hours

Completely agree, and I say this having written mostly JavaScript professionally for the last several years. It's sad to think of the millions of engineer-hours spent trying to make JS usable for today's applications. IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so. ES6 might actually be ok, in the sense of "about as good as Python 2.3".

coldtea 11y ago
>IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so. Well, ES6 wasn't available "the past 10 years or so", whereas it will be next year, and recent 6-to-5 transpilers make it a backwards compatible option too. >ES6 might actually be ok, in the sense of "about as good as Python 2.3". Well, it's more ubiquitus that Python, more dynamic, more modern (if you include ES6 features), tied to a more powerful environment (the web), and beats the shit out of Python regarding execution speed.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  > Well, it's more... None of these things are features of the language itself (except arguably "more modern", whatever that means). They're all byproducts of the fact that JS is the only language that runs in a browser. JavaScript has basically succeeded dramatically in spite of itself by piggybacking on the runaway success of the web/browsers.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >They're all byproducts of the fact that JS is the only language that runs in a browser. So? The end result is the same, Javascript has these attributes and Python doesn't.
agumonkey 11y ago
I was under the impression that all dynamic languages were converging around a similar set of core principles. - builtin type literal - closures and fp idioms - generators - asynchrony - comprehensions
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  closures are a horrible anitpatterb imo. abritrary anonymous state potentially from anywhere in your application - how can that be a deairable goal.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    It's simple anonymous encapsulation. I'm fond of FP idioms so I may be biased but most of the time I'd take closure based combinators over Objects.

coldtea 11y ago

>IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so. Well, ES6 wasn't available "the past 10 years or so", whereas it will be next year, and recent 6-to-5 transpilers make it a backwards compatible option too. >ES6 might actually be ok, in the sense of "about as good as Python 2.3". Well, it's more ubiquitus that Python, more dynamic, more modern (if you include ES6 features), tied to a more powerful environment (the web), and beats the shit out of Python regarding execution speed.

ForHackernews 11y ago
> Well, it's more... None of these things are features of the language itself (except arguably "more modern", whatever that means). They're all byproducts of the fact that JS is the only language that runs in a browser. JavaScript has basically succeeded dramatically in spite of itself by piggybacking on the runaway success of the web/browsers.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >They're all byproducts of the fact that JS is the only language that runs in a browser. So? The end result is the same, Javascript has these attributes and Python doesn't.

agumonkey 11y ago

I was under the impression that all dynamic languages were converging around a similar set of core principles. - builtin type literal - closures and fp idioms - generators - asynchrony - comprehensions

smrtinsert 11y ago
closures are a horrible anitpatterb imo. abritrary anonymous state potentially from anywhere in your application - how can that be a deairable goal.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  It's simple anonymous encapsulation. I'm fond of FP idioms so I may be biased but most of the time I'd take closure based combinators over Objects.