Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

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> HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience

I think that's related to the high fault-tolerance in Javascript. A good developer is good in any language, so she can work with Javascript. A beginner or even a bad developer can make things happen in Javascript, when that is not always possible in other languages. So the entry point level is so low that a lot of people is using it.

> Other platforms are not very 'hackable'; why is this?

I prefer strong typed languages. I use TypeScript when I have to do some JS work as it is easier to maintain in the long term. But that means that you need to know what you are doing before starting to do anything. Compile, fix errors, repeat.

I can see that for starters JS is more fun and "hackable", as it was BASIC for me when I started.

>> > HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience

> I think that's related to the high fault-tolerance in Javascript.

Also, in Electron apps you can access the Chromium Dev Tools directly in the app (unless the app author has disabled it). Chromium's Dev Tools are pretty much the gold-standard for hacking during runtime.

> Chromium's Dev Tools are pretty much the gold-standard for hacking during runtime

... if you don't include any IDE with a built-in debugger.

Chromium dev tools essentially IS an IDE with a built-in debugger. You can set breakpoints, step over/into/out of code, monitor network requests, view/edit the DOM tree, edit CSS in real time... For some code, you can even edit it while it's executing. Plus it exposes a REPL at window scope.

SmallTalk and Lisp would have something to say about that.

I can assure you that a bad developer can make things happen in any language. And it will look and behave like shit in all of them. There is no language that makes a developer write good code by magic.

There are languages where non-developers can make SOMETHING happen (like make the monkey dance[1]). There are languages where non-programmers can't -- you have to be SOME kind of programmer, good or bad, to make C do something other than look at you unkindly.

1) http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/221615/why-do...

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