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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

I'm a lone wolf in the Java space, and I must say that this one really hits home. I've been dealing with so many Java devs who are unwilling to approach anything else that I am sick and tired of their whining! These people are even moaning about JavaScript. I mean - Come On! (Job style)

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I primarily use Python, C++ and Rust these days and I would certainly moan about having to pick up JavaScript.

Funnily enough, the list of complaints was almost a perfect mirror of C++ dev complaining about Rust.

That doesn't even make sense. There is absolutely no parallel in going from Java to JavaScript with going from C++ to Rust.

When have you used it last? The ecosystem around it sucks but the language itself is not too bad, es6 has made the syntax pretty bearable

ugh

undefined is not a function!

> The ecosystem around it sucks but the language itself is not too bad

The problem is that the ecosystem is what matters nowadays. A language can suck donkey balls and win as long as it has a robust ecosystem (see: VB6, PHP, etc.)

Python and Rust have phenomenal ecosystems. I have no clue about the C++ ecosystem nowadays.

I just started using it recently and while writing in Babel/ES6 is nice, figuring out which framework or libraries to use (React vs Web Components and React vs Vue vs Polymer vs Angular vs...), sass or less, to redux or not, setting up webpack is definitely not an enjoyable experience. The beauty of many other languages is it doesn't usually involve so many decisions. There's usually an undisputed better library, a recommended setup, but js ecosystem now has so many options that it only leads to decision fatigue.

The semantics is the major pain point. It doesn't flag many errors. Python is a much easier language to dev/debug in because of this. Also, if you're going to transpile, why not transpile from a nicer language? ES6 is competing with ClojureScript/TypeScript/etc.

Is the 'transpile' nonsense a java script community thing ?

Yes, I guess "compiler" confused too many developers who thought it implied native code.

"transpiler" is a subset of "compiler".

Transcompile is very old term in computing, at least the 80s, specifically referring to compiling from one language, to another high level language.

CoffeeScript simply made the shortened term more popular, but the use of a more specific term is nothing to get irritated about.

True, but transcompiling hasn't been a very commonly used term for that so it's not an obvious term to use. For example, the early C++ compiler that targeted C was not referred to as a transcompiler. Nor was the popular f2c fortran-to-c compiler.

It's not just Java either. I worked with one OSX/iOS dev who knew Objective-C inside and out, but knew no other languages and didn't want to learn any others, because after all you can do anything in Objective-C.

I asked him what he used if he just wanted to write a quick little script. "Objective-C."

There's something to be said for his kind of mastery of a single language, but it was different from the multilingual culture I'm used to.

I wonder if he's using Swift now...

Wow this really makes me grateful for the team I work on. This past 4 months we had to build some stuff that was off of our usual platform using Python and none of us had any real world experience with python, but we all buckled down and became quite proficient. None of us really complained (ok we did complain some about the import system but other than that we were good) and we were able ship a great first pass at the problem quickly. I guess curmudgeon devs are just curmudgeon devs.

Are Javascript and Java really that similar? I know plenty of front-end Javascript devs who are pretty uncomfortable with Java development.

Other than some syntax similarity, no

Most of the code I've written in my career is JS/TS, with Java and Python probably tied for second. I'll admit to not liking Java but it's got nothing to do with not wanting to learn a new language. Most Java code is extremely verbose, with tons of boilerplate for doing simple things, like copying props from one object to another.

I upvoted you solely on the "Come On!"

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