4 ms·
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
by 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 agoWell, 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 agoYes, "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.