Comment by artellectual | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artellectual | Hacker News Reader

It’s a shame that people feel this way about Ruby. The thing about ruby and scripting languages like JavaScript is their nature make them very easy to dig in. That’s why you see these scripting languages being used everywhere. The same problems mentioned here plagues JavaScript yet it’s the most used language on the web.

I’ve personally built rails app that have been running for the last 5 years with clients using it to process millions of USD and I rarely have to touch it. And even now when I have to make changes it’s easy to fix and patch up because it was built right.

Most founders who don’t understand development “need things done yesterday”. If your business doesn’t take into account technical debt you are going to skimp on things and cut corners. It’s not ruby’s fault. It’s the business owners job to understand development and the process of building risilient long lasting software and not put developers into impossible timeframes.

From my experience business and marketing people who “need it now” don’t know what they are doing business wise too. Businesses take years to build. Nothing is ever needed “right now” if business is well planned and well executed. There is always enough time, and if there really isn’t technical debt is accounted for and fixed quickly.

That said it’s also important that technical leadership constantly inform and communicate with business end regarding development time and the concept of technical debt.

Don’t even get me started on business people who “need it now” based on “projections”, and then forget about everything they asked for the next day. Or “I need it now” “make it happen” to stroke their ego.

When you find yourself blaming the tool look at yourself as an individual and look at your team.

The same problems mentioned here plagues JavaScript yet it’s the most used language on the web.

JS achieved popularity because it was the ONLY choice in its domain. That's a rarity in PLs, and can't be extrapolated to any other language that I can think of offhand.

NodeJS is a choice, not a compulsion like client side. Be sure to make that clear separation.

I can see the value in minimising the number of languages you need, and you're already constrained by the client, but I take your point. Node is an abomination, noone would choose it freely.

Node is "Stockholm syndrome". Since you have to use JS for the web if you want to reduce code duplication and the number of languages you use you have to bring it on the backend.

Out of all the dynamically typed scripting languages, I prefer JavaScript. Is there something horribly wrong with me?

Linguistically, my second choice would be Scheme, but I still find JavaScript to be more ergonomic for most tasks.

It's also way more familiar to more people, obviously, so I think it's a totally reasonable choice for a lot of tasks.

I think Javascript is not as fundamentally unsound as, say, PHP. You can see that it was designed by people who had a clue about how languages are supposed to work.

The big problem with Javascript is that conceptually it's closer to a functional language than C or Java, yet it opted for a C-style syntax with a bunch of hacks (semicolon insertion being arguably the biggest) so I find that its syntax doesn't really match the way it's used and you end up with rather clumsy looking code even for very idiomatic constructs. Not to mention the super weird type conversions.

But that's rather subjective, IMO the biggest problem is simply the lack of a comprehensive standard library even for basic things. I'm not really a webdev but I have to maintain a web interface for one of our products, it uses JQuery, underscore.js and d3.js for various things. There's a significant overlap between these libraries when it comes to standards algorithms and DOM manipulation so you have to learn two or three ways to do the same thing depending on the situation. I shouldn't need external dependencies to have access to underscore.js's "map" or JQuery selectors.

Coding in JS feels like coding in C if it was standardized without stdio.h and string.h. Have fun re-implementing strcat every time you need it.

> I shouldn't need external dependencies to have access to underscore.js's "map" or JQuery selectors.

Been a while since you did need. document.querySelector and .querySelectorAll are everything about jQuery that's worth having, and every browser has implemented them for years. Arrays have a map method that does what you expect it should, although do be aware of the odd calling convention. Objects don't map natively, but their keys do, which I very rarely find fails to suffice. (And for those things that really can't be expressed in stdlib without considerable reinvention, Lodash is a strictly better Underscore.)

It's just a reminder of how incredibly outdated the intel is from HNers weighing in on Javascript in a negative light.

I explicitly mentioned that I wasn't a webdev, I never pretended I was some kind of authority about JS.

I maintain my point though, so far most sizeable JS projects I've seen depend on JQuery for one reason or an other, so clearly even competent JS coders feel the need to supplement the functionality of the standard library. As for the built in map, the fact that you can't use it on objects is the reason I ended up requiring underscore.js (alongside with the .find and .uniq methods, and probably a few others).

I could also have mentioned how hacky and messy it becomes if you decide to split your JS project in multiple files. Or the hack to create "modules", which is at the same time very clever and pretty terrifying.

But you're also conflating server-side and client-side (jQuery) Javascript.

Client-side applications have baggage (infinite deploy targets) that you don't have with server-side applications (one deploy target), so the comparison is disingenuous.

I see your point but that's not really what I meant. I wanted to say that server-side JS is a direct consequence of client-side JS.

If Javascript had stopped being a thing in browsers do you really think Node.js would've gained significant traction despite the numerous alternatives?

As far as I can tell the main selling point of Node is that you can use the same technology on both ends and even share some code. If you remove this from consideration then Node competes against Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP... And it's not clear how it's better than these.

Is it clear that Python, Ruby, Perl or PHP are better than Node with JavaScript? I don't think so. They're all slightly idiosyncratic dynamically typed scripting languages with their own sets of quirks.

BTW, the main selling point of Node over those languages was that the runtime was faster and more capable at multiplexing I/O in server code.

I don't think you can find the stuff d3.js does in many standard libraries. The things in jQuery and underscore have gradually entered the JS standard lib, I think your information is outdated.

> Coding in JS feels like coding in C if it was standardized without stdio.h and string.h. Have fun re-implementing strcat every time you need it.

That's a really bad example, stdio.h and string.h are notoriously horrible. Should I use strcpy? That can cause buffer overflows. Maybe I should use strncpy then? Oops, that's a buffer copy function, not a string function(it can result in non-strings)[1]. What about strcat and strncat? Well, strncat actually appends a null character, so you have to keep that in mind. How do I even use gets, getchar, fscanf properly? Here's a compilation of coding standards and pitfalls, many of which involve the standard library https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/c/SEI+C...

[1] https://www.approxion.com/?p=2565

I think a big standard library is a tradeoff question, but also, the standard available functionality is something I really like about Node.

It's got map, filter, reduce, just like all modern browsers, and it's also got nice and easy builtins for JSON parsing/dumping, HTTP serving, regular expressions, etc.

And still the stdlib isn't bloated with lots of weird stuff, it's kind of nicely minimal. Not perfect at all, but in a pragmatic sense it's often very satisfactory.

My real favorite language is Haskell, and that language is also both loved and hated, and one of the problems with it is the standard library. There's no regexps, no HTTP serving, no JSON, hell, people even import external dependencies to get convenient records.

I'm kind of cynical and picky but tell me a language and I will give you a litany of horrible problems with it—really.

Go's type system is stupid; Rust's compiler is slow and it's hard to learn; C is unsafe and has undefined behavior; C++ is a mess; Ruby is full of monkey patching; OCaml's syntax is idiosyncratic; Haskell has problems with laziness, records, the proliferation of language extension, an "im very smart" community, etc; Smalltalk is Unix-hostile and insular; Common Lisp is too mutable; Scheme is too fragmented; and so on and so on and so on.

So I think of choosing a programming language as answering the question "Which horrible nightmare seems least awful for the particular thing I want to do right now?" and JavaScript is, for me, quite often a reasonable answer.

First choice is prefer javascript and second choice is scheme? Can confirm something is wrong with you. Trust me, I'm from the internet.

Is this the order you learned programming languages in or something?

Quick, what's the syntax for updating a hash table in Scheme?

"Well, it depends on if you mean SRFI-44 maps, SRFI-69 hash tables, R6RS hash tables, Racket hash tables, MIT hash tables, Scheme-48 hash tables, or . . ."

Some examples.

- UNIX and C.

- Android and Java

- Windows and .NET/C++

- JME feature phones

- iOS and Objective-C/Swift

Or to taking it down to memory lane,

- Burroughs and ESPOL/NEWP

- IBM RISC systems, IBM zOS and PL/8

- IBM 400 and PL/S

- Lilith and Modula-2

- Native Oberon and Oberon

- UCSD and Pascal

- Lisa, Mac OS and Object Pascal

- Lisp Machines

- Smalltalk workstations

- Xerox Star and Mesa

- SpinOS and Modula-3

- .... (plenty more to list)

I'm not familiar with the older examples, but only feature phones from the first list are as tightly coupled as Web is with JavaScript. On all others platforms you can either run native code, or code compiled for the platform's default VM, or both.

Then by that way of thinking the Web is not tightly coupled with JavaScript, because you can use JavaScript as a target language on a compiler backend.

The alternatives to the languages I listed, don't enjoy the same support to 100% of plaform APIs, and respective SDK tooling.

Going outside the eco-system means manually writting FFI bindings, not being able to use the GUI designers if available, lack of debugging and profiling support at the same level as the platform tools.

>Windows and .NET/C++

Not true. .NET is VB, C#, which are completely different from C++, and you can write a Windows application in almost any language imaginable.

.NET is VB, C#, F# and C++/CLI.

Sure you can write a Windows application in anything else, but be prepared for a 2nd class experience, writing FFI bindings on your own for the Windows API, without access to the tools provided by Visual Studio.

Everyone forgot about good old win32 it seems...

I can't change how integer division works globally by requiring a module in JS (as per the example in the article)

JS has its own problems, but Ruby makes it extra easy to shoot yourself in the foot

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it actually happens.

My time is pretty much 50% Ruby, 50% JavaScript. "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a complaint I've often heard about Ruby, but in practice, I've encountered it precisely once in the last five years (extlib breaking with recent Ruby because of a to_h conflict, IIRC). I've lost way, way more time than that to JS idiosyncrasies.

> "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a complaint I've often heard about Ruby, but in practice, I've encountered it precisely once in the last five years

We've had something like 20 of those in the last year alone. 70% of those come from Rails, and some have been quite severe. Maybe it's tied to what we do which is definitely not a simple app, for which Ruby is not entirely the right one for the job but it's definitely not obviously the wrong one either. With years of business logic, tuning and bug fixing there are things you should never do[0], but even coming to terms with what Ruby is and what its limitations are after all these years in the trenches doesn't mean we can with absolute certainty avoid getting hit by structural damage coming from idiomatic flaws which we have clearly identified through proper root cause analysis to be endemic to the Ruby way (which includes a complete disregard for backwards compatibility, even when it can trivially be made so[1]).

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10085

That's interesting - I don't use Rails so don't see that so much. (A lot of Ruby hate traditionally seems to be misdirected Rails hate.)

There's perhaps an argument for "Ruby - the Good Parts"... but you could argue that it exists and it's called Crystal.

Or Elixir.

Rails is basically it's own world, and libraries that are written predominantly to be used with Rails tends to be full of anti-patterns in my experience.

Avoid Rails and Ruby becomes a far more pleasant place. Certainly not flawless, but you avoid a lot of the pain.

Maybe not division, but...

    > Math.abs(-1)
    1
    > Math.abs = function(x) {return x + 1}
    > Math.abs(-1)
    0

JavaScript yet it’s the most used language on the web.

It's the ONLY language on the web. If there were alternatives with a useful standard library and a way to define functions and objects that programmers of other languages are used to then the alternative would be more popular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com