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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript isn't that kind of programming language. I don't know why people are constantly trying to make it something else.

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Javascript is, without exaggeration (and with much chagrin), the language that has done more to popularize functional programming than any other programming language in history. It's only natural that they'd continue pushing on that front. :P

Second most after spreadsheets

Yes I took a functional programming course with Racket. But in hindsight Javascript made me appreciate and understand functional programming way more.

This was by accident though.

My pet theory:

Front-end devs are generally stuck with JS, but they wish they were able to use other languages, but they can't, and can't convince their managers to use Clojurescript or Purescript, so this is what happens.

What's bonkers to me is that ECMA would prefer to keep adding features like this instead of adding a macro system.

JavaScript with macros? Please please no. Can you imagine that?

I'm not buying that theory. I'd love if more front-end developers were eager to use PureScript or Elm, but popular sentiment appears to be that anything other than JavaScript is weird or hard or impractical or unreadable.

There is an increasingly large population of "programmers" that have never known anything other than Javascript and don't understand the concept of "different languages for different purposes". They want Javascript to do everything so they don't have to leave their comfort zone.

I can't say I blame us, as its the utility lingua franca for UIs, especially with cross platform UIs via React Native or NativeScript.

Web browsers are a long ways off from WASM being acceptable as an alternative in most cases, as it yet can't access the DOM directly.

Its not that we don't understand different languages for different purposes, its more what real alternative do we have here and if we want certain features in the language we have to follow the process to get them.

"There is an increasingly large population of "programmers" that have never known anything other than Python and don't understand the concept of "different languages for different purposes". They want Python to do everything so they don't have to leave their comfort zone."

Also, s/Javascript/$LANG_YOU_HATE/g

But clearly we need "that kind of programming language" for rich client web apps. We need many of the modern language constructs in such a language. Would you advocate for an entirely new language to meet that need?

This is perhaps a controversial opinion, but I don't think that you need this at all to do programming. This is just syntactic sugar! Type some parentheses and move on.

Then we might as well give up async/await, promises, generators, recursion, null coalescing, and more.

After all, they are all “syntactic sugar”, right?

What does that mean?

1. Javascript is at its core a functional programming language. In many ways it is more like lisp than like java (and lisp was the original intended syntax for javascript!) 2. Adding pipe operators is 100% in line for a functional programming language. 3. Even if it weren't, adding functional features to a high level language is definitely a good thing.

Why do you think it's not?

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