When JavaScript was first released, it was a god-send. The alternative was vbscript and if you think JavaScript is bad...
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I love javascript and how loosey goosey it is, I must be the odd one out. Then again my apps tend to be database driven so it's mostly just a UI and very thin API layer.
This is scriptism
In 1994, CGI back-ends were the closest thing to interactivity in the browser, and that's far back enough that a good deal of it was written in C. Strong typing abounds!
But JavaScript was an absolute joy by comparison. Heck, even Perl CGI was a joy compared to having to write executables for every fricking thing.
Note that by JavaScript, I mean the mostly hand-crafted stuff in earlier sites, not the enormous frameworks that are in use these days.
I get why JavaScript can be terrible but at least there's TypeScript. I'd argue Python suffers from the same problems but hasn't got anything comparable to TS for keeping types in check and can't autoformat well because whitespace is syntactically meaningful. In that way I think Python is worse to write maintainable code with.
Kids complaining about JavaScript while I'm at work, looking at fucking COBOL, or trying to maintain C# exe that were written by somebody who clearly did not understand OOP yet underlie the entire tool chain of a 3k+ employees company.
Oh and go check out the "natural language" syntax of Macromedia Director scripting (Lingo), for your edification...
Languages are tools. Some of them are really shitty tools, for sure, but if you think JS is it, you haven't seen anything.
JS isn't that bad provided you just use it for frontend UI, it's quite good at that
I hate all these "hurr durr javascript bad" posts. It's really not so bad, and worse languages exist. It's really just a bad, overused joke.
Js is what you make of it. It can be a godawful mess but it also can be really awesome. It's a really easy language to understand, that is a good thing. But it's also a double edged sword because that means that novices can write absolute spaghetti code in it. That's not the fault of the language though.
Except nit having strict types makes it harder to read, not easier. You have to try to remember what type of data each object contains. Strict typing makes it easier to read. JS is slightly easy to write though, for better or worse, although usually harder to come back to for the same reason mentioned earlier.