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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

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’.

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> 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.

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.

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'

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