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Comment by zkldi | Hacker News Reader

> People who are confused about equality shouldn't design programming languages:

This is a very dull criticism of JavaScript, everybody uses ===. While it's definitely true the language has some poor decisions (`with`, `==`, etc.). You can write JS without using any of these features (and almost everyone does).

Infact, just using a decently strict ESLint config will get you most of the way there.

It's controversial, but I think somewhere under the cruft of JS is a good language. The syntax is dead simple, functions are first class, and with something like TS you can get static typing ontop of all of that.

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> The syntax is dead simple

It really annoys me that people confuse ease of use due to familiarity with simplicity.

Many programmers will be familiar with the typical curly-braced C-style syntax many mainstream programming languages have and so find JS syntax easy to get into but that has nothing to do with simplicity.

Building a parser for JS is not exactly simple nor is teaching new programmers the syntax. Lua is vastly superior in both aspects. People just tend to forget the pain most new programmers have to go through learning a curly braced languages, having to figure what all these weird symbols and different kinds of braces and how to type them.

JS is arguable even worse than other curly braced languages because of weird exceptions like automatically adding semicolons to line endings or these fancy arrow functions. Honestly JS is one of very few languages were I actually need to look up syntax after having not used it for a while.

I don't personally think there's anything complicates about arrow functions. They're syntactic sugar for `function() {}`, with the exception that they have sensible binding of `this`.

I do agree that Lua is simpler, but I don't think this is an area where JS is that bad.

I’ve used JavaScript for about 25 years, sometimes more seriously, and always hated it. I’ve always found it unpredictable, I don’t like the turtles-all-the-way-down thing going on with its objects. I’d like to leverage my experience with regular class definitions and instantiation from Java workalikes. I’m sure many people love JS’s take on OO but I find it annoying.

A perfect example: I read hey there’s a cool simpler way to write small anonymous functions called arrow syntax. Nice let me try it, hm it’s not working —> google —> arrow functions have no access to ‘this’.

> I’d like to leverage my experience with regular class definitions and instantiation from Java workalikes. I’m sure many people love JS’s take on OO but I find it annoying.

That's a bit like complaining about a language without types not having interfaces. I mean, sure, but it's also clearly not what that language is trying to do. Prototype-based programming is object-oriented programming without defining classes, that's basically the thing that sets it apart. If you're trying to do classical OOP with prototypes, you're not really embracing the paradigm of the language you're using.

> A perfect example: I read hey there’s a cool simpler way to write small anonymous functions called arrow syntax. Nice let me try it, hm it’s not working —> google —> arrow functions have no access to ‘this’.

Not sure what this has to do with OOP vs prototypes, or even Objects. But yeah, new language features sometimes modifies behavior like in this case with arrow functions (which are not just a different syntax to write anonymous functions). You're also wrong that they don't have access to `this`. They do, but arrow functions don't define a new lexical scope so `this` is referring to the closest part that did define the bindings for `this`, `super`, `arguments` et al.

> That's a bit like complaining about a language without types not having interfaces

Totally agree. I wouldn't make the mistake I see often of saying "for this reason JavaScript is objectively bad" -- but it's bad for me.

> you're not really embracing the paradigm of the language you're using

That's true, and related to the problem. I don't want to learn another paradigm, I want to get my work done. JavaScript's paradigm isn't intuitive to me, and at this point I assume will never click since I've been using it fairly consistently for 25 years and it still makes me uncomfortable.

> Not sure what this has to do with OOP vs prototypes, or even Objects

It doesn't. It's an example where JS often doesn't behave the way I expect it to. Some examples of this unpredictability have been fixed with newer versions over the last 25 years but this just illustrates the problem I often have where I make what I feel are reasonable assumptions about how its scoping or execution model works and have to trial-and-error my way into getting it to work right. This is after countless time spent reading JS books and posts over the years.

I accept that this may just be a personal issue, but I also don't think I'm the only one.

There's a few ways of doing anonymous functions now, and some capture `this` and some don't. This is not a nice part of the language perhaps, but it's not like e.g. Java doesn't have similar complexity with inner classes and outer 'this'

If you try to use a new language feature without reading the documentation first, you will probably run into difficulties. This is not a unique problem to JS.

I think your answer just solidifies their point since your proposed solutions are to avoid parts of the language and bolt two pieces of tooling on top.

Fair enough -- Like I said, I think somewhere under the cruft of JS is a good language, but I don't think it's as bad as OP implies.

Of course you'd think that, there's even a famous book called "Javascript, The good parts".

The point is that we wouldn't have needed decades of work on tooling to achieve what could have been done from that start with intelligent language design.

Decades later you may believe that "everybody" uses "===", but actually "==" is still there, and many people still use that regardless of what you choose to believe, simply because it's there and 33% shorter and looks like C and Stackoverflow is full of examples of it, and it STILL commonly causes many subtle hard-to-find bugs.

People like Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, James Gosling, Guido van Rossum, and Anders Hejlsberg are enlightened, experienced programming language designers who actually know what they're doing, and they don't make stupid amateur-hour mistakes like JavaScript was cursed and riddled with from day one, that make it difficult for compilers to optimize code, and which we're still using tooling and linters and IDEs and compilers to work around, because they're still in the language and will never go away.

"My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg

"It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg

But you also missed the reference to how deeply and tragically confused the bigoted designer of JavaScript is about equality when it comes to human beings, not just programming languages. And the terrible damage his confusion about equality and his promotion of inequality did to Mozilla and his co-workers and his own reputation and legacy.

I love what JavaScript finally evolved into after decades of intense development and revision and optimization, which took the precious time and effort of uncountable extremely talented people, but all that effort that was pissed away working around JavaScript's original stupid unforced flaws could have been applied in so many much more productive and useful ways, instead of wasted the way it was, and the world would be a much better place if a language like Lua that wasn't so naively and incoherently designed in the first place was used instead of JavaScript.

>the bigoted designer of JavaScript is about equality when it comes to human beings

Zero relevance to programming language design, makes your argument look very weak and emotionally-motivated. If you have to sink to bringing up the personal views of the language designer you're criticizing on an entirely unrelated matter to make a point, you don't really have a point.

>his own reputation and legacy

His legacy is quite fine, I love Brave browser and use it everyday and so are countless individuals. Not all of us are so fragile to the point of not using good software because its author just so happens to disagree on a completely irrelevant social issue.

As for Javascript, it's a terrible mistake but I would love seeing the ones you will make when you're forced to design and implement a language in 10 days.

I would have used Lua in 10 days. That's the point.

My reasons for not using brave have nothing to do with the author, and everything to do with not wanting to participate in cryptocurrency bullshit.

> But you also missed the reference to how deeply and tragically confused

I couldn’t find this reference in your little essays here. Where is it?

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