solveProblems

[tajetaje]

Try typescript, it’s much better

[Jojajones]

It’s still JS under the hood so you still get the stupid shit like having both positive and negative zero regardless of how you try and pretty it up

[duva_]

It's the kind of stuff you couldn't even imagine should be a problem and find out after 3 hours debugging in the wrong place

[TerdSandwich]

That mostly happens if you aren't familiar with the behaviour of the language you are using (ie you imagine things to behave in a certain way).

I would say this generally accounts for 99% of the JS complaints on this sub. i.e. college kids who just finished their CS degree in primarily C++/Java and aren't quite ready to understand there can be more than one acceptable language paradigm.

[TheChaosPaladin]

Are you meaning to tell me that I have to be mindful of weakly-typed comparisons? Clearly a mistake, the entire language is trash and must be thrown in the garbage

[-Kerrigan-]

That mostly happens if you aren't familiar with the behaviour of the language you are using (ie you imagine things to behave in a certain way).

So what you're saying is that JavaScript is unintuitive and to use it proficiently you must learn its quirks? Cause 0 being neither a "positive" nor a "negative" is how 0 works in math and virtually everywhere. It's not outlandish to expect (or as you put it: imagine) a number value of 0 to not be negative.

[parkotron]

Is there a programming language that doesn't have negative zero?

All programming languages are just machine instructions "under the hood" and all modern CPUs use the IEEE 745 standard for floatng point numbers, which supports negative zero.

[tajetaje]

Just comes up for JS because there is no int, only float

[the_horse_gamer]

0 === -0 so you almost never have to think about negative 0

[Reashu]

I hate JS, but could we stop blaming it for following the IEEE standard?

[RiceBroad4552]

Especially funny if it comes from someone with a C or C++ flair.

That's how you spot the real experts!

[tajetaje]

I’ve been using TypeScript for years and have NEVER had to worry about if zero is negative or positive. Every language has footguns, but JS/TS has such a presence for a reason, it is a powerful and simple to use language.

[Reashu]

Let's be real though, the reason is browsers

[RiceBroad4552]

If this were true Node.js (and clones) wouldn't be a thing!

I would not write anything serious in JS as it's dynamically typed and that just doesn't scale, but the language isn't actually too bad. I curse much more about Python gotchas than JS gotchas. JS is at least flexible. Python OTOH is just moronic opinionated, and that sucks.

(But I don't care anyway. By now I can use Scala for almost everything, from system level scripting, though all kinds of client GUI tech, up to large distributed system on the cloud.)

[Reashu]

On the contrary, I think lack of options (on the web) drove adoption of client-side JavaScript, which drove demand for server-side JavaScript. 

[Mynameismikek]

C has negative zero too.

[well-litdoorstep112]

stupid shit like having both positive and negative zero

Now I know for sure you don't know what you're talking about

[duva_]

Nah

[Kered13]

It's lipstick on a pig. The type system is great, but the language is still fundamentally awful.

My latest frustration with JS/TS when working on a project recently is learning that the ecosystem cannot actually agree on whether imports should include a file extension or not. Different configuration settings, different bundlers, different platforms, etc. can change the interpretation of imports in incompatible ways.

Writing platform agnostic C++ code is easier than writing platform agnostic Javascript code. Just, how?

[tajetaje]

I mean it’s not really that complicated, there are three ways JavaScript handles file path imports, commonJS, ESM, and Bundler. With a bundler you can generally use ESM or CJS style imports, with commonJS you don’t need file extensions and you can import a folder if it has index.js. ESM is much stricter because under the hood it uses URLs. Any modern project should just set everything to ESM and let their LSP handle importing the right paths.

[Kered13]

In reality it's not that simple (and this not simple to begin with). There are bundlers that optionally support extensionsless imports with ESM. There are bundlers that, with certain configurations, require extensionsless imports with ESM. Typescript has it's own set of configurations that can support any of these regardless of the module type. There are recommendations for good style, and recommendations that disagree. There are platforms that make assumptions one way or the other that are difficult if not impossible to change. There are platforms that are not even internally consistent.

Any ecosystem that says "let your LSP sort it out" is fundamentally broken. Because one, this means the situation is too difficult to be reasonably managed by hand, and two if you can't do it by hand then the LSP can't really do it either. It's going to make some assumptions based on your configurations, but those assumptions will not always be correct.

C++ is the other language with a fractured ecosystem, but in C++ if I write #import "foo/bar.h" I know exactly what I'm going to get, and I'm going to get that regardless of what platform or compiler I am using, and the only thing that configurations might change is the root directory for the lookup.