Ask HN: Why do you hate JavaScript? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do you hate JavaScript?

11 pointstuxie_33 comments

I've noticed that every time a CLI project is presented here, regardless of how good/useful it is, there's inevitably a comment along the lines of "too bad it's js".

Makes me wonder why you never see comments like that with languages where you have to manage the memory yourself, which is very error prone unless you really know what you are doing. Or with interpreted languages that are famously slow, like ruby or python. It doesn't even matter when it's typescript, it's just the fact that JS is what will run at the end.

If you ever got this feeling of "too bad it's js", may I ask: Why?

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I think people "hate" JavaScript because it's very hard to avoid it. If I don't vibe with, say, Scala, I can simply not use it. There's not a lot of situations where I'm forced to use Scala.

JavaScript is different, as it is the only language that can reliably run on modern-day browsers, which gives it a kind of reach that no other language can match. If you want to do anything interesting on the web, you have to deal with JavaScript, even if you don't like the language.

I love JS. JS and its big brother TS are my #1 choice for front end development.

What I hate about them is two things:

1. Rules for semicolons. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.

2. = and ==. Ugh. The Bug Maker.

3. + for concatenation. Yikes!

4. Arrays are objects except when they're not but objects aren't arrays. :-(

JS is essentially Lisp w/o parens. Everything is an object. Everything is by reference. And everything is mutable. Lisp is what we use on the backend and these two are kissing cousins.

> 2. = and ==. Ugh. The Bug Maker.

You mean == and === ?

I believe they are referring to:

  let x = 5;
  if (x=3) {
    foo();
  }

The common defensive way of handling this is:

  if(3=x) {

so it errors and catches the missing =

Yes, that. = is for assignment and == is a test. The test inside your if needs == to work.

For most people JavaScript hate is a meme. They have either never built a bit project in it (or at least not since the language improved).

Sure it has its quirks, but with modern tooling, the idea that you can't build good software in JS is ridiculous.

I agree but I’d much rather use Typescript for bigger projects. Admittedly this could be an old-dog brain thing: I’m used to typed languages.

I feel with pure js you’d need more test coverage and better comments. My experience on larger js code bases it’s hard to know what to pass into a function “oh now I’ve read all the code I see you want an object with a couple of promises and a number” can be bad for productivity.

But I imagine in disciplined hands JS can scale without static type safety.

A combination of:

[ ] Will probably be abandoned in less than a year

[ ] If it does not get abandoned, it will not follow semantic versioning and introduce breaking changes outside of major releases. A routine `npm upgrade` may or may not break everything

[ ] If it follows semantic versioning, there will probably be a major release with breaking changes every few months

[ ] Probably has a 500MB+ dependency tree

[ ] Frequently has security issues with a dependency 4 levels deep and you can't upgrade without conflict with another library or because a dependency 2 levels deep is abandoned

Do these issues exist in other languages? Sure but those incidents are quite rare and isolated. But these issues happen *way* too often in the JS ecosystem.

How can the most popular language in the history of computing be abandoned in less than a year? There is more code right now running JS than there is in all other languages combined.

I was referring to the majority of JS projects

I'm still not understanding. How would the majority of JS projects change? And why?

They are talking about libraries being abandoned or otherwise introducing breaking changes.

Ah. Thank you. That problem is caused by developers who choose to introduce breaking changes in new releases, or who don't fix known bugs. Those are common problems in a lot of software.

This! But also:

[ ] Requires a Javascript interpreter, maybe even a full browser engine to run. May consume 2gb of RAM just to show me a screen.

I don't hate Javascript, I actually like it for quick scripting and data-mangling. But I DO hate the never ending bits of syntax sugar added on top that I rarely actually care about. Also tired of people constantly inventing reasons to compile things INTO JavaScript (e.g. Babel, TypeScript, CoffeeScript).

No manual.

Java, Python, Erlang and some other languages come with detailed documentation of the language and runtime which is sufficient to use the language. You are NOT at the mercy of StackOverflow and Google SEO Spammers if you want to answer simple questions.

In Javascript they blew up the tower of babel and dispersed the manual to the 4000 corners of a hypercube.

There are ways to compensate (MDN, the official ECMA docs punch above their readership weight, ...) and I have a feeling that the frenetic progress has slowed in the last two years but I dread teaching anybody else Javascript since I can't ground it in a epistemology the way I can with Python and Java.

Also check out https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

I rather love JS. Honestly choices of languages is pretty low on my priority list, but JS's prototypal inheritance is flexible & most of the language works well enough.

I do say though, I find the modern tool chains we have to use to effective leverage modules & use them on the web to be a bit of an abomination. There are much much better tools now, and it's a legit hard real problem, one faced by few other languages, but it has sullied what used to be an elegant & clear what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) system with something arcane & difficult.

After some basic things like imports and fat arrow were added, I didn’t really have much to complain about. Shitty programmers write shitty code, no language is going to solve that. If you write clear code, JavaScript is good enough if it pleases you.

Also, async/await made it tolerable for people that are not used to callback/promise chains (which is anyone that didn’t do comprehensive JavaScript before 2015). It’s like skipping the rough years, lucky y’all:

Has CLI taken on a different meaning than Command Line Interface? The primary purpose of javascript seems to be for adding code to web pages.

Javascript can't access the file system, what good would it be for most command line programs?

Python seemed like a far better choice until they abandoned 2.x because of their Unicode fetish. There are hints that 4.0 won't happen.

C, C++, C#, Java, Clojure, Rust, Pascal all seem like better ways to go for the command line.

You can write JavaScript outside the web browser using nodejs. You absolutely have file system access.

For whatever warts the language may or may not have, command line scripting in JS is a pleasure. Often you don't care about or need the benefits of those other languages. You can write CLIs, web servers, wrangle data or even just replace shell scripting.

> Javascript can't access the file system, what good would it be for most command line programs?

I mean, NodeJS has been around for more than 10 years now? Of course you can write CLIs with JS.

My initial reaction:

What does Node have to do with Javascript? It would be like some random library coming up every time I search for pascal.

Googles node.js (instead of saying -node.js like I did yesterdays search about javascript and command line):

Oh... it's not a library, what a stupid deceptive name for an interpreter.

> I mean, NodeJS has been around for more than 10 years now?

And server/desktop support (with filesystem access, though the specific mechanism/API was different for different implementations) for JS is much older than Node; Rhino and WSH JScript support came about in the late 1990s.

> Javascript can't access the file system

No, code running in a browser can’t access the file system, because browsers don’t expose an API for that. Other JS environments (e.g., Node, Windows Script Host, etc.) have different capabilities. A CLI app based on JS almost certainly isn’t targeting the browser, so browser limitations that don’t apply elsewhere aren’t relevant.

> Python seemed like a far better choice until they abandoned 2.x because of their Unicode fetish.

I’ve done plenty of CLI tools with Python, both 2 and 3, and its definitely not worse for that purpose now than it was with 2.x.

I've built multiple JavaScript project at scale, and I would never trust it over java or C sharp. JavaScript allows you to make way too many mistakes.

I do think Dart is the best of both worlds though. Having real types, not hacked together typescript stuff is very good. That's the other thing the nodejs ecosystem feels like a bunch of duct tape slap together again and again

What do Java or C# offer that Typescript cannot offer? Genuine curiosity as I’m not quite sure myself.

It seems, through my experience, that Typescript isn’t “hacked together” as you imply. It’s just another Type-system, just like Java or C#’s?

Java's thread support is as correct as can be and provides sufficient primitives that if you can't use a multi-core machine efficiently it is your fault, not the fault of your language and runtime. Same for C#.

This holds for "high-level" resources.Wwith the multi-threaded model you can share a single large immutable configuration object between all threads, or pass a database connection from one thread to another with close-to-zero cost.

Java and C# languages are a bit more CPU efficient. In the cloud computing world a website publisher pays real money for server CPU and RAM but can use the CPU and RAM on your computer or phone for free.

Babble.

The weird transpilation system constantly breaks. I guess maybe one day they'll be better tooling around this, but it's not there yet. And I've worked with node in some capacity since 2013, things always feel fragmented and broken

Have you tried Vite[0]? It's an amazing dev server I learned about in an HN post. It does a fabulous job of TS transpilation and has many other niceties for dev work.

BTW, with modern browsers, why would you need to transpile JS (as opposed to TS)?

[0] https://vitejs.dev/

> What do Java or C# offer that Typescript cannot offer? Genuine curiosity as I’m not quite sure myself.

A vast ecosystem of battle-tested libraries for one.

Js was born like a shitty php-like language.

But matured and grew over most of it’s mistakes and problems.

Without typings it’s still not very scalable, but TypeScript elegantly fixed this issue.

If people hate it it’s their problem, not the language. Either they don’t really know it or they don’t really understand its area of applicability.

All the criticism i see is about comparing cars to apples.

All these “java has correct multithreading” arguments is just a big facepalm.

Cmon, people, open your eyes once in a while.

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