Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

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I've done quite a lot of JavaScript development, enough that I guess I'm a "JavaScript developer" (though thankfully that isn't my current day to day job) and I hate it. So now you know of at least one.

I agree with everything camus said. Yes JavaScript has some cool stuff in it, but taken as a whole it is a pretty shitty language. This has less to do with the creation of JavaScript than it does the practical reality that JavaScript cannot really be changed in fundamental ways without immense amounts of politics. Pretty much the entire time JavaScript has existed it was due to be fixed in a couple of years, but then political fiasco after political fiasco (eg. EcmaScript 4) delays this.

JavaScript as you can use it today sucks pretty much as much as it always has, and is only tolerable now because there are some good libraries that hide the shittiness of the language from you. Wouldn't it be better to have a web language without such a shitty core, that didn't require 100k libraries to hide you from the terrible bits?

> good libraries that hide the shittiness of the language from you.

Ah, the "only the libraries make the language tolerable" argument.

My experience has pretty much been that most of the devs who thinks the libraries are hiding problems with the language are confused on one or both of the following points:

1) the distinction between the DOM and JavaScript (for those who don't know: jQuery and the like address problems with the former)

2) the idea that a language is terrible if it doesn't have a specific class-based OO model

Hard to say in your case, though, given that you didn't mention any specific problems or solutions presented by specific libraries.

I end up using underscore.js in every project I work on because JS doesn't have good functional programming built in, at least not that you can count on in all implementations.

I use date.js or moment.js whenever I have to deal with times/dates in JS because the built in date support is pretty bad.

That being said, I think libraries like this take Javascript from being "tolerable" to "lovable"

What are the problems with Javascript you speak of? The libraries hiding you from terrible bits, at least the ones I use, have to do with the DOM and not with Javascript.

The problems should be blatantly obvious to developers who have used languages other than JavaScript and PHP (which both have many of the same flaws).

Once you've studied and used languages like C, C++, Python, Java, C#, Haskell, Scheme, Erlang and Standard ML, you'll see what we mean when we say that JavaScript is a very flawed language. Pick any of its features, and compare that feature to the equivalent feature in the other languages. JavaScript's approach will generally be the worst of all of them.

Variable scoping, unavoidable global namespace pollution, === vs == insanity, etc.

Last week I learned about another crazy "feature": Function hoisting

http://elegantcode.com/2011/03/24/basic-javascript-part-12-f...

But how do libraries help you from that?

Kitchen sink libraries like jquery + jquery ui save you from having to write much JavaScript at all beyond basic glue code. The less JavaScript I write, the happier I am. This is in stark contrast to other languages I work in where I actually like to roll my own frameworks.

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