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I personally am so over this argument. Sure, that is roughly a fact about the time in which it was designed... but that was 20 years ago. Since then there has b

I personally am so over this argument. Sure, that is roughly a fact about the time in which it was designed... but that was 20 years ago. Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language.

murbard2 11y ago
That's irrelevant; advancing the language isn't an exercise in programming language design, it's an exercise in getting everyone to support the extension and in avoiding breaking legacy code. It has almost nothing to do with the maintainer's talent as programmers or PL experts. If you doubt this argument, consider the fact that the horrible scoping, the weak typing, the insane casting rules are still here to this day; empirically you're wrong.
- aaron-lebo 11y ago
  Well, a lot of the little issues are being slowly fixed (see let and scoping in ES6). This goes back to the point of the person you are responding to. This is a thought more than a full-fledged argument, but perhaps little issues with the language actually can and do make people better developers when they are aware of them. My friend started driving a scooter. Dallas isn't particularly conducive to that. My friend says he has since become a better driver because he knows one little screw up by him or someone else can end his life. Similarly, you'd better be aware of weak typing and casting and code accordingly or you might get hurt. Of course, you shouldn't have to...but that doesn't make people worse developers. But the truth is, JS has a lot of features which make it great for becoming a good developer. It's less class-based than Ruby and has better lambdas than Python which I would argue make it better for functional programming than either.
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Yes, "let" will finally fix the horrible scoping - 20 years after the creation of JavaScript. In the meantime you'll still be stuck using lovely constructs like === and !== And yes, JS support for lambda expression is surprisingly nice, but that is basically the only nice surprise.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language. JavaScript engines have seen a lot of effort from some of the best compiler and JIT experts in the industry, including former Self VM architects, yes. The language itself? I honestly can't say that. Lua is a way better ECMAScript than ECMAScript itself, and the focus should have been on trimming it down to a smaller but easily extensible core, as opposed to the feature piling that's going on.
fsloth 11y ago
"Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language." If you build a church from chewing gum and then get Gustaf Eiffel to design a few towers to it from steel with furbishments by Antonio Gaudi the fact still remains there is a heap of melting gum at the bottom. Stuff that needs to be designed up front cannot be fixed after the fact regardless of the amount of ducktape and personell applied.

murbard2 11y ago

That's irrelevant; advancing the language isn't an exercise in programming language design, it's an exercise in getting everyone to support the extension and in avoiding breaking legacy code. It has almost nothing to do with the maintainer's talent as programmers or PL experts. If you doubt this argument, consider the fact that the horrible scoping, the weak typing, the insane casting rules are still here to this day; empirically you're wrong.

aaron-lebo 11y ago
Well, a lot of the little issues are being slowly fixed (see let and scoping in ES6). This goes back to the point of the person you are responding to. This is a thought more than a full-fledged argument, but perhaps little issues with the language actually can and do make people better developers when they are aware of them. My friend started driving a scooter. Dallas isn't particularly conducive to that. My friend says he has since become a better driver because he knows one little screw up by him or someone else can end his life. Similarly, you'd better be aware of weak typing and casting and code accordingly or you might get hurt. Of course, you shouldn't have to...but that doesn't make people worse developers. But the truth is, JS has a lot of features which make it great for becoming a good developer. It's less class-based than Ruby and has better lambdas than Python which I would argue make it better for functional programming than either.
- murbard2 11y ago
  Yes, "let" will finally fix the horrible scoping - 20 years after the creation of JavaScript. In the meantime you'll still be stuck using lovely constructs like === and !== And yes, JS support for lambda expression is surprisingly nice, but that is basically the only nice surprise.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language. JavaScript engines have seen a lot of effort from some of the best compiler and JIT experts in the industry, including former Self VM architects, yes. The language itself? I honestly can't say that. Lua is a way better ECMAScript than ECMAScript itself, and the focus should have been on trimming it down to a smaller but easily extensible core, as opposed to the feature piling that's going on.

fsloth 11y ago

"Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language." If you build a church from chewing gum and then get Gustaf Eiffel to design a few towers to it from steel with furbishments by Antonio Gaudi the fact still remains there is a heap of melting gum at the bottom. Stuff that needs to be designed up front cannot be fixed after the fact regardless of the amount of ducktape and personell applied.