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Comment by thiagofm | Hacker News Reader

I think you guys obsess too much about programming languages. I doubt that anybody doing something useful cares about THAT "wohooo expressiveness".

JS is alright, dammit. You don't need CS, you need to get your shit done.

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I used to think like that. Then I found the next logical iteration from "just get it done" is "get more done faster with less code". Hence, CS works better than JS for getting that youknowwhat done.

Alright, I buy your argument. Now go and do everything in assembler, right now. Deadline is yesterday. What are you looking at?? Go!!!

You are exaggerating.

Is it only me who likes JS better than CS? :( It's stylish.

Now seriously, it's not just the way it looks. If you never spent at least half an hour playing with a language such as python or ruby, you will probably never know what is it that makes programmers all warm and fussy about their languages. Just take a look at array comprehensions (or list comprehensions in python) to know how succint and powerful they are, and how much clear the code looks. It's about replacing four or more lines of js with just one, readable line of coffeescript (or python).

It's all about power, flexibility, succintness and readability, all things that make programming more enjoyable and fun.

But better expressiveness is exactly what you need to get your shit done. Being able to say what you mean concisely lets you focus on solving your problem and move on to the next task faster rather than getting bogged down into getting some petty details right.

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