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Comment by such_a_casual | Hacker News Reader

Is JavaScript the only "language" you've programmed in? Personally, I prefer a language that doesn't require large frameworks and libraries that are here today, gone tomorrow for basic language constructs like name spacing or library references. Personally, I prefer not having "engines" silently fail on something as fundamental as syntax errors, causing bugs that can't be reproduced or tracked down. Want syntax checking? You guessed it! Another Framework/Library/Tool to learn or build! Not horrendus? Good Enough? JavaScript is the language of Satan's incompetent stepchild.

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Please don't do the programming language flamewar thing here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871532 and marked it off-topic.

I don't know how you can hate Javascript or any other language so thoroughly unless you just finally branched out to your second language that you're currently in honeymoon love with.

Took me two years of writing Clojure full-time to realize that there is no best. There are only trade-offs. These days I mostly use Javascript.

The story goes that I have played with many languages, but only used small amounts of js as needed before building an extension for chrome. I have never found a language to be so unfriendly to n00bs. One is absolutely required to learn third party frameworks and libraries just to do anything useful. There is a never-ending list of basic things that are not supported by the language. I have never had to use a third party tool just to check syntax in any other language. I don't see any trade-offs to using javascript at all. It is a language just like most C-based languages with everything chopped out of it. What benefits does javascript have over any other language?

> These days I mostly use Javascript

You don't use javascript, you use a framework for javascript. In fact, because browsers don't fully support EMCA 6, you are probably even using a tool to convert your javascript code.

I absolutely abhor javascript, to the point where I stopped working on my chrome extension (which is < 500 lines at this point) until I figure out how to do it in another language. Which will probably be clojurescript or typescript.

I think you would find Dart to be a true joy, given your complaints about JS. I switched to Dart, and now even looking at JS code with all those stacks of indented curly-braces hurts my eyes...

I think you're at a place where you would be best off indeed pursuing other languages and solutions. Your current frustrations with Javascript will be a powerful motivation to dig into new ecosystems.

I was in a similar place once and it compelled a tour of languages that's probably the most important event in my growth as a developer.

Finally, it seems like you're talking about client-side development. Client-side applications have to manage the intersection of state, user interaction, and some interface (browser API). That interaction comes with complexity that's classically hard to manage, else we wouldn't be spinning our wheels so much trying to figure out better ones.

Have you ever programmed in JavaScript? I don't use any of those frameworks or transpilers and it's nice. ive written plenty of ruby, Python, Java, and C. What are you talking about with syntax checking anyway?

I'm talking about chrome's extension library returning NULL instead of a "tab" object when creating a new tab because of a syntax error in a completely different file.

You're judging JavaScript by Chrome's extension API?

It had nothing to do with Chrome's extension API. The API works perfectly fine. It has to do with the nature of JavaScript where syntax errors are "forgiven" leading to unforgivable bugs that require line by line review unless you use a tool to check your syntax. This was not the first, last, or only syntax caused bug I experienced. It was simply the most frustrating and inexplicable.

Syntax errors in JS throw exceptions.

JS syntax tends to hide certain mistakes but errors always throw.

If Chrome's extension API swallows exceptions, that's not a JS problem.

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