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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

I think you miss the point. Some tools are made for precision while others are made for maximum functionality. The scalpel vs the Swiss Army Knife if you will.

Javascript is horrible in many ways. It really wasn't even designed per se. It's just a mismash of hacks that Netscape put together with a few more hacks tacked on after the fact. But while that makes it messy it also makes it amazingly flexible.

That's why it's become so popular.

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I didn't say it wasn't useful or popular. Just that it sucks! If it had just a few more things, it would be a lot easier to layer stuff on top of it, but we're kind of stuck with it now.

If you really hate it there's always Actionscript or if you're really brave you can even use C# or Visual Basic via Silverlight

No I'm totally with you, AS3 and C# are way better languages than JS. The CLR (and JVM, too) are all good ideas, I think that's what JS should have been instead of a weirdly dynamic C-syntax language with some useless prototype extension bolted on top (among countless other problems.) But JS, like most of the web technologies we're stuck with, weren't so much designed as they were a series of hacks layered on.. series of tubes.. anyway, I'm preaching to the choir I'm sure.

Silverlight is actually a lot better than Flash in most ways that I've found, too bad it's not installed everywhere like Flash is. I would make some comment about MS being evil, but I think they're about on par with Adobe these days (except they still seem to employ engineers occasionally.)

I think you should step back, and go read "Javascript: The definitive guide". Also, for a good explanation of prototypical inheritance (Which is far from useless if you understand it), checkout the Douglas Crockford lectures (Vids on yahoo).

Here is Crockford's 4 part series, concatenated: http://s3.amazonaws.com/2008/09/javascript.mp4 (178 MB).

Or read javascript: the good parts, it's one of the two reasons I'm a happy javascripter. (The other is that I can restrict myself to ff3.5 which not many people will be able to)

you bastard

What makes AS3 so much better than JS? Aren't they both ECMAScript languages?

Typing and being able to get an object's identity. Those two things make a huge difference.

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