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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

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Well this person is not the only one who thinks js (and web stuff in general) is terrible. I mostly dislike the pace of crapification; I comment almost daily on repositories asking why they made that breaking change with zero benefits for the user. Usually 'we are cleaning up' or so; there are npms that really need never be changed that are changing weekly just because 'keep them fresh'. That kind of misery is just weird and frankly depressing; update something one week after writing and plop, it breaks. For No Reason as no improvements were made, just breakage for the sake of upping the date on github and npm (the most terrible I find the VC backed open source ones; I guess they have to update all the time for the sake of the VCs looking in even though no updates are required). I use lisp, c++ and go libraries that haven't been updated in 10 years; guess what; they work and work well and stable for another decade because they really never need anything new and people are not vying for update kudos or whatever.

But you can use vanilla js you say? Yes it is true, but I find js very terrible and I want to write things in common lisp, or, if need be, Go. Neither of these require any bullshit with tooling or anything hard. You can learn enough Go in a few hours to be productive (like C) and llms are super at it (unlike js/ts where they produce things that had breaking updates 40 times since the llm knowledge cut off for no reason at all). With vugu framework you don't need to touch js either. Common lisp is also not hard to learn, bit harder but even better tooling and you don't need to know all of it to write nice stuff; there is the clog framework which is basically all you need to get going as it is an ide, web dev environment and you get away with writing almost no js.

Your first paragraph complains about people, not the tool. It is a side effect of low barrier for entry, not some awfulness of JS.

> Neither of these require any bullshit with tooling or anything hard.

JS requires any text editor and a browser.

TS requires Node and npm i -D typescript.

> You can learn enough Go in a few hours to be productive (like C)

You want to say that C and Go are easier to learn that JS? JS is literally primitive types, objects and functions at its core.

> TS requires Node and npm i -D typescript.

So need to install node and npm and then typescript. Go is 1 binary to download and throw in a dir.

I don't find js hard to learn (and I have been programming in it since it came out (I was in the CMS business since the early 90s), I just find it ugly and annoying to work with. But yeah, I guess the ecosystem definitely doesn't help as it's hard to see the proliferation of terrible software/frameworks and habits totally separate from the language; apparently there is something in it that attracts these terrible practices.

Kotlin and Rust are modern languages that were designed much later and not so hastily, so they have less warts than JavaScript as a result.

Kotlin is a lipstick on a pig that effectively doesn’t exist outside of IntelliJ, single vendor that is only interested in driving sales to their IDEs and doesn’t work without bringing baroque Gradle.

It has amazing coroutines library and it started with a nice set of features but failed to evolve. Sealed types are a joke compared to union types in TS. No inline types so you’re forced to created stupid data classes everywhere even if it’s used only once. Constant fight between wannabe functional programmers that try to replicate Rust’s Result monad, but without official language support, and exceptions crowd. Static delegation. Still no pattern matching when even freaking Java has it nowadays. Hilarious. Constant focus on KMM, even though language stagnated for a while.

Rust is just a pain to develop. Slow to compile and constantly have to please borrow checker. I’m not sure if you’re joking, but you can’t seriously think that Rust is better language for prototyping than JS/TS.

> designed much later and not so hastily, so they have less warts than JavaScript as a result.

That’s irrelevant. Modern JS has evolved over the years and is a joy to use now.

No, I wasn't suggesting that Rust is better for prototyping, the only thing I said is that Kotlin and Rust (that you mentioned yourself) are better than JavaScript because they were designed much later and more thoroughly. TypeScript is a different thing to me, it makes part of this new generation of languages, its only problem is that it works on top of JavaScript.

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