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Comment by jammygit | Hacker News Reader

This did not occur to me but is obvious now that you have said it. Interesting!

I wonder how many such tweaks it would take it to be worthwhile for companies to add it as a build step

I understand what you and OP are getting at and I'm saying it's wrong but it misses the broader point that others posters were positing. The exact same point I came to make but found myself in good company. Why?!? And it's not specific to JS or a direct criticism of JS, this issue it becoming endemic. It's happening everywhere now. We shouldn't have to depend on language specific hacks to make things "work" in that language. JS has gotten so out of hand now we have/need new metalanguages like TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Bable, (insert buzzwordy JS lang here) that transpiles into JS because it's become so unwieldy. All this just to be able to make a simple web app. The fact that V8 can parse JSON faster than processing a native JS literal is a compiler problem. Why is it suddenly my problem? It's one thing if it's a bug that we have to temporarily work around (these things happen) but now it's becoming the norm. How are people new to the industry supposed to learn something like JS if the only way to be proficient at it is through an endless, ever changing array of hacks? Especially when it's something as counterintuitive as parsing a string is somehow faster than the actual equivalent code. The "move fast and break things" mentality that has permeated tech as of late has done just that, got us nowhere fast and broke everything along the way.

Javascript is messy but it's everywhere and has gotten significantly better with recent versions. Typescript is just a different flavor offering strong typing and other features, just like Scala or Kotlin can also replace Java if you want.

This particular hack is absolutely nothing you have to worry about, just like esoteric performance tweaks available in any language stack. Write the JS you need and use it. Then profile and optimize as necessary.

You can apply all of the same reasoning to assembly. People did write that by hand at some point. Then they abstracted that away into higher level languages. I’m sure there’s a ton of hackery going on there as well.

It just seems like a human nature to paper over.

It’s an evolution.

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