Comment by josefonseca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefonseca | Hacker News Reader

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> How is the rise of the (unfortunately) sole technology that the ubiquitous multimedia platform of the beginning of the 21st century understands "surprising"?

I recall that 14 years ago DHTML was the all the rage and javascript was the key to DHTML. So I took up JS and bought books and went in head first.

Conclusion: it was impossible to take that language seriously. Javascript was a hack.

So for me, the rise of javascript as anything more than a browser helper language has been very surprising. I still have some prejudice towards it. Maybe others feel the same way and knowing how O'Reilly comes from the UNIX tradition, I'm sure that's what they meant with that title.

Similar story for me. Except that in 2010 I re-learnt JavaScript and discovered how beautiful, flexible and powerful it can be as a client side / server side language

I've been node'n it up a bit myself lately. The language is easy to write, pretty easy to get things done, and server-side node provides a lot of great libraries.

That said, the development ecosystem around Javascript is very immature. To really write decent amounts of server-side JS as a team, people often employ linters and other things to sanity check their code. Debugging? Mostly printf's (or equivalent). Scoping rules can also be pretty annoying.

It is useful for getting things done, but it generally isn't my first choice (at least server side).

Have you not seen [1] node-inspector? It allows you to debug your server side code with the chrome/safari web inspector.

[1] https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector

Adrian - I have and it is a very useful tool. I guess my main gripe is the fact that the tool set is there in some form, but each has its area and none of them are really connected/integrated.

I suspect the toolchain will eventually get there, but it is a big step back if one is used to more integrated ecosystems.

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