Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

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I agree, I haven't had time to revisit it to improve the wording, will do it tonight. This is really what I meant:

Our decision behind JavaScript:

We want our students to understand technology at a conceptual level first, end to end:

1. Client side - Mobile, web, terminal 2. Server side - Database interactions, system design and optimization 3. Batch - ML models and scripting

AFAIK, JavaScript is the only language that is able to cover everything end to end (front end to backend to scripting to even ML) so I'm able to come up with appropriate exercises for each of the moving parts.

Afterwards, they should pickup domain specific language that optimizes for each task.

I think it may be too overwhelming for students to learn different languages and learn the high level concepts at the same time.

Unfortunately, there may be more instances of word choices. Each lesson is about 4-5k words (totaling 30k) and I simply don't have enough time to think critically on every word so feedback like these helps. Feel free to bring these up in the chatroom and help us improve our wording!

Don't worry too much about the JS haters. JavaScript, a dynamically typed, flexible language is a great first language to learn programming with.

As for the wording, all you need to add is the word platform:

JavaScript is the only language that lets you build applications for any technology platform, including the web, desktop, mobile apps and terminals.

Thank you, I updated.

> JavaScript is the only language that is able to cover everything end to end

I also recommend js to ppl who want to learn to code, for the same reasons (I.e. both frontend and backend in js).

+ Writing browser games can motivate some students

I think you are right and I'm annoyed that you are. Because I think JavaScript is a really hard language to master. Ubiquitous yes, versatile yes but so full of cruft and bad design decisions that it really can put many people off programming.

I highly recommend working through YDKJS[1] if you have an interest in and/or a reason to "master" JavaScript.

I think you may find that some of those "bad design decisions" are actually not so bad, or at least manageable, once you will have read through the book.

1. https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

And the ecosystem is a confusing, overwhelming mess.

I personally think it's only as overwhelming and confusing as one's predisposition to FOMO. I stopped worrying when I found out at meetups and interviews that it really doesn't work like that in most parts of the real world.

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