this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
1670 points (88.2% liked)

Technology

59329 readers
4634 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

but they are not that big of a deal to an experienced JavaScript programmer.

A well-designed language wouldn't require "experience" for stupid gotchas like these to not be that big of a deal in the first place.

After all, I'm sure a sufficiently "experienced programmer" could adapt to anything up to and including fucking Malbolge if necessary, but that doesn't mean it's equal to a language that's actually good.

Differences in quality between languages are real, and Javascript is closer to the bad end of that spectrum.

Every language is gonna be weird if you don't know it well enough. In Lua arrays start with index 1. Is it weird? Yes. But do Lua programmers care? Probably not.

The stuff that many people say is bad in JavaScript is usually irrelevant. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad parts like the Date api or the lack of types is a flaw to many people. Those are actually important issues. In this case they are solved by libraries and TypeScript. The performance is also a problem in some applications. Which is why there is WebAssembly, which can help in some cases.

So there are plenty of real flaws that can be pointed out, but you have to know the language to be able to tell what actually matters. To me it doesn't seem any worse than any other modern language.