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Comment by jsprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

I believe there is already work on type inferers and static analyzers.

Stripped down, functional C with type inference? Yes, please.

How about a language that is not shit instead ?

Javascript is the C++ of web dev. You bolt a ton of things on top of a shitty language and you hope to obtain a slice of it that is decent in the long run. Except it's still going to be full of terrible quirks and 30 ways to shoot yourself.

I'm sorry, but I don't want this future for programming.

One thing JavaScript gets very right is first-class functions. There's nothing bolt-on about those. It makes it very easy to tolerate warts (which don't come up often anyways).

Piss poor string handling functions out of the box?

Shitty date/time implementations (unless you're using moment)

Callback hell?

That's just my list for this morning.

> Piss poor string handling functions out of the box?

Don't know what you mean by this. As for the other things; like I said, getting first class functions right makes those other things unimportant. Are you running into the problems with DateTime that often? I can't even remember what those problems are. I don't doubt they exist, but I think you're over-inflating the importance.

They are not "very right" due to all the scoping weirdness and the late binding semantic.

C++ wouldn't have been the first thing I'd compare JS to. Visual Basic, maybe?

But yeah, if you absolutely want a dynamic language, you have much saner choices with a considerably more robust ecosystem (hello Python).

> I'm sorry, but I don't want this future for programming.

I don't want this present either :)

You are so right !

All of which are going to be mediocre because JavaScript is a very hard language to simply reason about for machines.

The language is not fixed, further, tools do not need to support every feature.

Here's the thing, JavaScript as it is (specifically ES5, a little bit less so with ES6, but even then, still an issue) is too dynamic to reason about very well, especially when using large libraries that do crazy things. Yes, it can be changed to be easier to reason about, but the fundamental issue I see is that too many people are using the very dynamic features of JavaScript.

Javascript could be versioned. If Javascript is changed to be more static and less "forgiving", browsers could ship with one engine to run legacy ES6 code and another to run new code.

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