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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> JavaScript has no standard library.

    >> Math.sin(1.57)
    0.9999996829318346

This would be pretty surprising output if there were no standard library.

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"No standard library" might be too strong a criticism, but "a dozen or so built-in global variables with various methods" is still probably not the user experience that most desire.

"A dozen or so built-in global variables with various methods" is exactly what a standard library is. (Well, usually it's more than 'a dozen or so'.) Generally those variables are of the "package" type, but no such type exists in JavaScript.

What would you put in the JavaScript library?

See Python (for feature rich version) or Rust (for less feature rich standard lib).

No one ever needed a `leftpad` for strings.

it's a bit exaggerated, but it's true that the standard built-ins for javascript is poor compared to something like java.

That's hard to argue with, though Java isn't known for convenient UI development either.

well it depends on what you mean by convenient - java's got a UI toolkit that works out of the box for all supported environments (awt), and ontop of that is built a fair number of UI frameworks like swing (which is also part of the java standard library).

> java's got a UI toolkit that works out of the box for all supported environments

That's not a useful observation; JavaScript has that too.

> and ontop of that is built a fair number of UI frameworks like swing

Swing is what I was thinking of; I've never gotten the impression that anyone liked it.

what languages are known for convenient UI development?

The sum language of HTML+JS+CSS, or in other words html files. I haven't seen a better way to write UI in text files, other UI frameworks relies a lot on building the UI in some special editor or aren't easy to use.

HTML as a UI is geared towards making documents and displaying text and graphics in a rigid layout/format.

It's not geared, imho, for a UI with lots of interactivity - e.g., imagine trying to implement blender or an audio processing app (like audacity) in html/css. You'd basically be creating new primitives on top of html, and build your UI on that (or install one of those UI libraries that _renders_ to html).

SVG is part of HTML and good for most of the needs except for the audio wave stuff (which Delphi couldn't do either)

I think the gp meant standard UI library...

There's a standard library for that, too, but it's not exactly high-level.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/cr...

At a higher level, that's pretty much what React is.

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