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JavaScript is 26 years old today. Crazy. Feels more like NaN years to me.
4 months ago · 👍 aka_dude, antolius, krixano, enceladus, bronzie_beat, cobradile94, gwenprime
Mistakes were made. · 4 months ago
I have no real gripes with the language itself, but the ecosystem seems extremely immature. Stage 4 framework cancer on one hand, and the comically insecure packaging system on the other. It's like they're determined to repeat every mistake other languages have made, and invent a few new ones to boot. · 4 months ago
So, imo, the popularity of hating on JS is *absolutely* warranted, especially when you are basically forced into using it in some sense. That and the JS ecosystem has became terrible, with NPM and Webpack (one of the worst things to ever exist). · 4 months ago
@martin I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this :P
Javascript is terrible even in any version of it. A bad programming language is one that, even with a good programmer, isn't able to write the best code. Part of the problem with JS is that there's no type system. The other is that it's Object-Oriented-y (technically, Object Prototypes). And the last is the API with browsers and with the DOM (the DOM is pretty horrible to program for, in my experience). · 4 months ago
JS seems to be one of those things you build as a temporary diy solution that then grows into a monster. As some provisional law we had in Spain going on, patched, for one and a half centuries · 4 months ago
Oh, in the case of Javascript, it didn't start as a well thought and well designed language. Sure, it has improved over the years, but there's still a lot bad stuff that won't disappear because there are improvements. If it wasn't because web browsers, JS would be on a different place (like happened with arguably better -yet flawed- languages). Typescript improves things, but still feels too little IMHO. There are much better languages (unless you're doing fronted programming on the browser, and then you can use TS). · 4 months ago
@dimitrigorvachov Yeah in part, and also just because it seems popular to people to hate it. Personally I think bad systems are almost always due to bad programming and design, much more than due to bad programming languages. · 4 months ago
so is the hate for it that I’ve seen just for the older versions? Because you tend to see a lot of hate geared toward JavaScript · 4 months ago
@dimitrigorvachov To be fair, the language has evolved a lot since 1995, especially more recently. Async programming is now much better with async/await, and things like object/array destructuring spread, optional chaining, etc., make writing JS much nicer. Perf is also massively ahead of most other dynamic languages. That said, all my JavaScript code is TypeScript these days, because really, why would anyone want to work on a long-term project with other people without even a basic type system. TS for me, in that sense, replaces JS, and the general trend is in that direction (see for example: https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/technologies/javascript-flavors/) · 4 months ago
i’m surprised that in that long of a time, no one has attempted to make a Java script replacement. · 4 months ago