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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

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Grow up.

And accept that both have merit. You may not like it but there's a reason languages, tools, companies, products, whatever become popular. And it isn't just because "people are idiots" or evil companies. Console wars are for teenagers.

Nah. You can be an adult and realise that your feelings don’t mean the world owes you anything, and still think Oracle are a bad company with bad values.

You lack imagination and ambition.

Of course they have merits. But, so what? I didn't dedicate my life to this field to build things that "have merit", but to build great things. And we have great things. It's just that neither Oracle nor JavaScript are among them.

You have no idea whether or not I lack those. If you're going to make a blanket ad-hominem statement like that, at least don't follow it up by agreeing with my point.

Nobody is telling you to build things that just "have merit". Just because you don't like them, it doesn't mean that great things weren't built off the back of Oracle and in JavaScript.

If some Oracle product is the best pick for the task, or JavaScript is the best pick for the task... will you pick it? Or will you whine about what you dedicated your life to?

If you can't see that other people might feel different about this, or be able to build great products with these, maybe you're the one without the imagination and ambition...

I strongly disagree. There are things far, far worse than JavaScript. I would even go so far as calling it "quite decent". I like to use it for prototyping and scripting quite a bit, it can be rather efficient and the "standard library" is very decent in my eyes. It has some footguns, and certainly used to have a couple more (that are discouraged now, but still people complain and call it bad because technically, you can still use the bad parts that any linter refuses). I even really like the idea of protoype-oriented programming and find it a bit sad we lost this in favor of classes, but I guess this actually makes the language a bit easier. Disclaimer: I am not a webdev, and if I do webdev, I use TypeScript. Personally, I consider e.g. Python far worse.

Learn ASP or VBA and embrace true suffering

ASP could be written in JScript and was the OG JavaScript SSR.

In some ways, easier to understand and better than anything we have now.

Do everything in serverside cgi programs, at least until WebAssembly disposes of the currently necessary JS wrappers to access the DOM.

Floss their teeth? Don't drink too much? Research before they vote?

Go back to pen and paper.

Working in my punch cards as we speak.

I mean, Fortran still exists.

Fortran is pretty great:

* First-class tensor manipulations (like numpy but in the core language)

* Fast math with the right compiler

* Automatically sized multi dimensional arrays on the stack

* Zero cost C interop

* Minimal runtime, no GC, compiles to small programs

* Generics

* Coarray based parallelism in the core language

Sure it has issues but if you want to write fast numerical code and don’t want to bundle 2GB of pytorch or however big the Julia standard library is, or you want to make a small library with a C API, it’s a pretty great language. There are 50 year old libraries that still work perfectly (and much faster than they did then!) You won’t get that kind of longevity out of Rust ndarray.

Having written one, I'd like to disagree with the "minimal runtime" point. Fortran's I/O system, intrinsic procedures, memory management, and derived types need a lot of code in the runtime support libraries.

So does COBOL.

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