Comment by ryanflorence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanflorence | Hacker News Reader

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> "I find the proposition that porting a library (no matter the size) gives you "as much experience as anyone" pretty dubious"

My intro comes off as though I'm claiming to be some sort of authority, which wasn't my intention at all. So good call on your part. I just meant "It's not like I've only spent 5 mins with the language". Lots of folks out there are dismissing it w/o giving it a shot.

However, I do know the language well at this point since it has a lot of rubyisms (and I'm alright with ruby) and at the end of the day is just JavaScript™.

Concerning images/symbols v. words. Like I said in the article, I _feel_ the relationship when I see `!==`, I don't feel it when I read `isnt`. However, I went from design -> code, so maybe imagery is a bigger deal to me.

> but I doubt very much giving stupid people JavaScript will give you overall less problems...just different ones

Yeah, one of which is not a less-than-optimal debugging experience.

> The only time I really break out the debugger is debugging other people's code.

Welcome to my article.

> Editor macros make inserting logs dead simple

I use vim, and I agree. But that's an extra few steps from my JS debugging. When something unexpected happens, I go straight the console, start adding break points, watch expressions, mutating data, etc. etc. to find the problem before I ever get back to vim. People who have always console.log'd will probably not get as frustrated as me. I feel like I'm limping.

Thanks for the criticisms. For me, the imagery is a big deal, it's not hand-waving, it's my true experience, and that of others I've talked to. We all have different minds.

Sure, likewise it's not my intention to write you off, you clearly have some good points based on real usage... I'm just trying to contrast your experience with people who have used it even longer still.

> Like I said in the article, I _feel_ the relationship when I see `!==`, I don't feel it when I read `isnt`.

Sure, I think that's fair. The point that I'm trying to make is that I think this is subjective based on your own personal background/brain/whatever other nebulous factors.

In your article it could be taken to sound like you are making a case that there is some neurological reason that "!==" is more readable, and I'm not prepared to accept that without some more substantial evidence.

I think I get where you're going, you're just trying to draw comparisons...I just want to add that those comparisons are somewhat nebulous and should not be taken absolutely.

> Welcome to my article.

I didn't get a chance to expand on that point because of space limits. What I mostly mean there is once you're in someone elses code, as far as I'm concerned it's basically all bets are off anyway. At this point when debugging other-code it's often JS, so the point is moot anyway. However, even when it's CS I don't find debugging the JS directly very difficult because it's clear enough for that purpose. Usually it's some issue like a value is not being coerced properly, or arguments being passed in the wrong order, and those are pretty easy for me to nail down with a debugger even if the source is a mess of compiled JavScript...then it's easy to fix it.

Re: debugging, I think we are on the same page. We have different styles. Yours is somewhat crippled by CoffeeScript. It may get better in the future, it may not. I just wanted to say I feel no such impediment.

> it's not hand-waving

My main objection is your examples. Like I said they could be construed as making a more scientific-objective case, rather than a more philosophical subjective one.

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