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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

"These ideas were initially worked out in the 1970s and 80s, and, in the 90s, were carried up by a huge wave of hype—the object-oriented programming revolution. Suddenly, there was a large tribe of people declaring that objects were the right way to program, and that anything that did not involve objects was outdated nonsense.

That kind of zealotry always produces a lot of impractical silliness, and there has been a sort of counter-revolution since then. In some circles, objects have a rather bad reputation nowadays."

Eloquent JS, maybe, eloquent writing. Not in this book.

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I disagree. The writing is excellent: pragmatic and insightful at the same time. In fact, your quote is a great example of its high quality. I don't need, nor do I like, the heavy handed style of some authors. Eloquent JS is eloquent both in its writing, and in the fact that it elevates javascript.

I can't say I expect a book about writing computer code to be Hemingway. What's the point of this criticism? The writing is clear, concise, and does exactly what it's intended to do.

Additionally, your last line has the worst punctuation of all time.

This book contains some of the best writing I've seen since beginning my study of CS.

And you might at least use correct punctuation when critiquing someone else's writing.

Note the author is not a native English speaker, and the book in its current form probably hasn't gone through the editors yet.

Apparently the book is done.

https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/494433950505644032

This book needs some serious editing. There is clunky English which native speakers can figure out the gist of it but English as a second or later language would have a problem with. There are parts where I wonder why certain terminology is not explained before using it and other areas where terminology is explained that I assume the reader needed to know before reading this material. Good technical books have a section in the beginning usually called something like "Intended audience" or "Who should read this book". I only did editing for a few years but those are the first things I noticed after reading the intro and chapters 1-3.

Could you be more specific about the problems you found? The first few chapters of the book have been edited by three professional editors at this point.

(Clarification: actually, that goes for the first 4 real chapters. The intro chapter might still be a little rough.)

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