Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelvin0 | Hacker News Reader

Learn Dart :)

As minimalistic as your comment is, I think it points to the single most important truth about JS: It's practically impossible for human beings to write “good” JS code. The only hope you have is using a sane language with sane concepts that can be compiled down to the JavaScript of the week (ES6, ASM.js, the works...).

I would argue that JS should be handled analogously to Assembler: Good for you if you understand it, but only highly trained field specialists in protective suits dare to write production code in it. Go and get a decent compiler if you can't avoid using that technology.

... I'll never, for the life of me, understand comparing a high-level scripting language to almost the lowest of low-level assembly languages, as if JS doesn't give you abstractions at all.

If you can't write good code in JS, it's because you're a bad programmer.

As a veteran C++ developer, I actually quite enjoy Javascript. Once I understood that Prototypes are linked lists and that *this is a pointer that changes according to 2 simple rules, Javascript became quite easy. I mean they even give you a GUI debugger. It's hard to get stuck for long, even though it's not not a Visual Studio. Like you said, you have already all the abstractions you need with this language. You can do complex things and for me, if I have composition, I'm pretty much already good to go.

Composition is really the key.

Just as much as you're a bad programmer if you can't write good assembler code. And I don't mean that ironically.

But academically being able to write in a certain language is still not the same thing as productivity combined with certain quality guarantees.

IDK, I've been writing JS since it was invented, so 20 years now. It was one of the first languages I learned and even then I thought it was easy. Certainly easier than C, which I was also teaching myself because it was clear at the time that nobody took JS seriously. And that was at a time when there were ZERO libraries. It took almost 10 years before anyone started serious work on libraries for JS. Up to that point, you just copy-pasta'd snippets.

I remember thinking it was easy like VB but was easier to show to other people. I still think of it in similar terms: easy to write like Python but a hell of a lot easier to deploy and show off.

> I think it points to the single most important truth about JS: It's practically impossible for human beings to write “good” JS code.

I'm sorry, but that's just an absurd statement. JS isn't that bad or confusing.

It's so easy to write code and have something running. It's a whole other affair with regards to a 'structured' project involving a team of devs. If you look at the myriad of libraries and frameworks for JS, just so the dev workflow stays at a sane level without ending up with masses of balls of muds. Including a .js within a .js has to be done outside of the language ... and that is just the tip of the iceberg last time I checked.

So, what's the point of WebAssembly?

https://brendaneich.com/2015/06/from-asm-js-to-webassembly/

Do you write that manually, too?

I think the point of it is that so people have choice on the client side. That doesn't make JS impossible to write or a bad language.

Lol, nice. I was going to say "Learn Haskell", but I figured I'd be downvoted into oblivion. In all seriousness I am actually using that strategy and so far it seems to be working well.

Well I mentionned Dart because it is a very small step up to learn when you know Javascript. Not sure the same can be said of JS -> Haskell ... don't get me wrong I started looking into Haskell and I find it fascinating!

Instead of JS -> Haskell I think I'd recommend JS -> Purescript[0][1]

0: http://www.purescript.org/

1: https://leanpub.com/purescript/read

Ahh yes, PureScript is definitely a good suggestion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com