Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I am going to disagree with you. I believe JavaScript is an excellent language, and as someone has already pointed out, it is based on ECMAScript, just like ActionScript. For one, it's turing complete, so it's not less capable than any other turing complete language. Second, JavaScript brackets and dot syntax will be familiar to any C, C++ or PHP programmer. In addition JavaScript's asynchronous nature and the extensibility power that prototypes provide make it a very easy and useful language, capable of creating very impressive applications. If you add into the mix the fact that it's standardized, supported by a vast amount of documentation online and powerful frameworks, known by millions of developers, and backed by corporations such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft then it becomes hard to dismiss it as a 'not a good language to develop in.' If your problem is with loosely typed, interpreted languages that's a different issue. If your problem is cross browser difference, then diss the browsers, not the language.

I also take issue with frameworks being described as "a twisty nightmare." Dojo is a joy to work with.

> it's turing complete, so it's not less capable than any other turing complete language.

Sorry but that's a stupid point that is irrelevant and it amazes me why anyone would seriously state it, yet many people do. Let's all use Brainfuck then. Or program in Minesweeper.

Dojo may be nice, but do you use Dojo and JQuery at the same time? Now what if you also find a nice component that uses Mootools, would you be comfortable including that too?

Turing completeness is only one of a few points I made. I agree if I had only said it was Turing complete then it would have been stupid.

As for using Dojo and Jquery at the same time, well that's sounds like bad architecture planning. Would using Coldfusion, PHP and Python in the same file sound like a great idea? Ok maybe that's a bit much, but how about several templating systems nested on top of each other in a python app such as mako, django templates, and clearsilver. Does that sound like a good idea? Don't mix JavaScript frameworks .

Turing completeness is not a point; it's as irrelevant as if you'd said that it's composed of 1s and 0s.

> Don't mix JavaScript frameworks .

That's my whole point. JQuery should just be for DOM manipulation (not a full fledged application framework) but the core Javascript library is so terrible it needs to include things like each, grep, map, and an implementation of string trim for Pete's sake!

PHP is a terrible language for encapsulation, but at least I have chance if I want to include more than one PEAR library. Encapsulation is possible - for instance I can bootstrap a Zend Framework application inside something else and I know it will work because it uses no global variables and it's simply not possible to extend the core language.

So what if I use Dojo and do really like a component in JQuery UI? If you don't think that's a severe and damning limitation then that's a failure of imagination.

Did you know that

  return { something };

and

  return
    { something };

are not equivalent in Javascript?

Then don't do that. Its easy enough to avoid. Javascript (like every language) has some really great ideas, and some really stupid ones, so just don't use the stupid ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com