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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Javascript as a language. Everything from OOP to imports feel hacked in rather than having been supported by the language itself. One can't even add 0.1 and 0.2 together and get what you'd expect. Variable definitions are global scoped by default, semicolons can randomly be omitted, etc. There are just so many things about the language that feel hacky or unpolished.

So it's fast these days... great? There's more that I seek for in a language than just speed. PHP7 and Pypy also do a pretty good job, and one can always offload the heavy lifting to some compiled code if it's really that important to squeeze the last few percent of performance out.

The only thing unique to JS (afaik) that I really like is addressing dictionary keys as object properties (`a={'test':512}; console.log(a.test);` instead of having to do `console.log(a['test']);`). I'm not sure why that is so oddly satisfying, but it is.

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> One can't even add 0.1 and 0.2 together and get what you'd expect.

That's floating point math, and persists in many languages [1].

> Variable definitions are global scoped by default, semicolons can randomly be omitted, etc.

Nothing random about it, automatic semicolon insertion is well defined/documented [2]. Also let [3] is your scoping friend.

[1] https://0.30000000000000004.com/

[2] https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/7.0/index.html#s...

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

> Nothing random about it, automatic semicolon insertion is well defined/documented

Figured someone would say that. Yes, of course it's not random: it's a computer, it follows the same instructions every time.

What I meant, of course, is that it isn't logical. You can't guess it without having to check the spec. In bash you know that a newline is as good as a semicolon, in C you know you always need a semicolon, and in Python you know you never need it. In JS it's somewhere in between. Reading that spec, it's when the next line would have syntax that is illegal if it were a continuation... so you have to do JS simulation in your head to check if your code could, perhaps, make sense as a line continuation. So I guess you just always have to do it. I'm not saying it's a major issue and this is the one reason I don't use it, but similar to how people criticize PHP for having inconsistent function names (which is also not a bug or broken), it would have been nice if it weren't the case.

> let [3] is your scoping friend

It's not about it being possible, it's that global scoped default is just asking for abuse of the global scope. Even PHP doesn't do that, and PHP is really made for quick and dirty web development (or at least it used to be, so it supports many things that make that possible).

You're totally safe unless you start line with parentheses, bracket or operator so it's not that hard - https://standardjs.com/rules.html#semicolons

const/let is the way of doing javascript, setting global will raise an error (click "run with js" http://jsbin.com/hogegikipo/edit?html,console,output). This is true for ES5 strict mode, ES2015 modules and anything you will transpile from ES2015 modules.

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