JS wasn’t created in 10 days. It was prototyped in 10 days, and the prototype contained very little of the stuff people complain about.
Hillel Wayne posted about this recently:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hillel-wayne_pet-peeve-people...
Hillel Wayne posted about this recently:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hillel-wayne_pet-peeve-people...
Brendan Eich himself calls JS a “rush job” and with many warts though, having had to add aspects that in retrospect he wouldn’t have. This snippet from your link is consistent with that:
Also, most of JavaScript's modern flaws do *not* come from the prototyping phase. The prototype didn't have implicit type conversion (`"1" == 1`), which was added due to user feedback. And it didn't have `null`, which was added to 1.0 for better Java Interop.
Like many people, I find JS super frustrating to use.And with TypeScript or linting, many of the strange comparison/conversion issues go away.
I struggle to find any substantial arguments against the js language, in spite of a lot of strong & vocal disdainful attitudes against it.
The biggest problem with JavaScript is that it's an extremely footgunny language. IMO, of the C++ variety, but probably worse.
1. The type system is unsound and complicated. Often times things "work" but silently do something unexpected. The implicit type conversion thing is just one example, but I know you've seen "NaN" on a page or "Object object" on a page. Things can pass through and produce zero errors, but give weird results.
2. JS has two NULLs - null and undefined. The error checking around these is fragile and inherently more complex than what you'd find in even C++.
3. JS has an awful standard library. This is footgunny because then basic functionality needs to be reimplemented, so now basic container types have bugs.
4. JS has no sane error handling. Exceptions are half-baked and barely used, which sounds good until you remember you can't reliably do errors-as-values because JS has no sane type system. So it's mostly the wild wild west of error handling.
5. The APIs for interacting with the DOM are verbose and footgunny. Again things can look as though they work but they won't quite. We develop tools like JSX to get around this, but that means we take all the downsides of that too.
6. Typescript is not a savior. Typescript has an okay-ish type system but it's overly complex. Languages with nominal typing like C# are often safer (no ducks slipping through), but they're also easier to work with. You don't need to do type Olympics for most languages that are statically typed, but you do in TS. This also doesn't address the problem of libraries not properly supporting typescript (footgun), so you often mix highly typed code with free-for-all code, and that's asking for trouble. And it will become trouble, because TS has no runtime constraints.
Other things worth mentioning are the unusual scoping (by default at least), prototypes, “undefined”, and its role versus "null"... the list goes on.
I give TypeScript a lot of credit for cleaning up at least some of that mess, maybe more. But TypeScript is effectively another language on top of JS, not everyone in the ecosystem has the luxury of only dealing with it, and across all layers and components.
Is my knowledge about JavaScript outdated and obsolete? Certainly. Is the above stuff deprecated and turned off by default now? Probably. I left web development more than 10 years ago and never looked back. I’m a bit of a programming language geek, so I’ve used quite a few languages productively, and looked at many more. But not many serious programming languages have left quite the impression that JavaScript and PHP have.
In the meantime, I have always remembered that one conversation I had with someone who was an ECMAscript committee member at that time: They were working really hard to shape this language into something that makes sense and compiles well. Maybe against its will.
EDIT: Dear god, I completely forgot about JavaScript’s non-integerness, and its choice of using IEEE 754 as its basic Number type. Is that still a thing?
The type system was weakened after the 10 day prototyping phase when he was pressured by user feedback to allow implicit conversions for comparisons between numbers and serialized values from a database. So it wasn't because he was rushing, it was because he caved to some early user feedback.