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Comment by blipblop | Hacker News Reader

> but almost everybody agrees it is flawed as a language. If that's the future, we are screwed as an industry.

What language is not flawed? And why are we "screwed"? I don't get this FUD...there are more important things than language-choice such as dependency management system + community + ecosystem. JS lets you get on with the job and get things done quickly. You need performance - use C/C++ bindings. Its been clear for a long time that JS is the safest long-term choice and is slowly creeping into every other language's castle.

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It doesn't bother you that huge portions of our tech stack are sitting on top of layers of terrible language design that our ancestors will have to deal with? Perhaps the parent post is looking more to the future. Of course it all still works, but when you think we could be doing the same job with Lisp, Smalltalk, (insert any non perfect, but much better than JS technology), it does make me cringe a little.

> that our ancestors will have to deal with

You meant descendants?

Anyway, they won't. They will throw away the garbage and rewrite anything good they find. Just like we do.

Haha, yes my goof up. I disagree that they will rewrite though. Nobody is willingly rewriting millions of loc.

Well, you were right about one thing: you don't get it. ;)

Just look at the prototype hell. Look at the quirkiness of the comparison operator. Type inference. The mess piles up extremely quickly.

"Disciplined devs don't make those mistakes" is NOT an argument and never was. Decades later, people believing themselves to be godlike C/C++ devs still make stupid mistakes.

But I guess learning from the past won't happen for people who fanboy and have a survivorship bias. And have money on the line.

It's flawed because 99.999% of the time your code will work just fine. Job done. Then one day, "undefined is not a function" and your airplane falls out of the air.

This happens in all languages... look at the Toyota acceleration bug for a real world of example of your hyperbole. They were using MISRA C. Languages dont fix spaghetti, laziness, tight deadlines, bad engineers, etc.

> This happens in all languages...

To some extent, yes, that happens in all languages. To some extent 10^100 and 1 are both numbers. That does not mean you can even compare them.

I'm not sure you can do spaghetti and still do MISRA C. Doesn't MISRA have some things about goto, cyclomatic complexity, and such?

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