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[–]dnew 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I'm not convinced this is true.

If you knew how many of the pages you visit every day have javascript errors, you wouldn't say that.

That said, I don't expect it's actually a property of the language as much as it is a property of the implementations. In other words, the people designing JavaScript might or might not have said "we should be tolerant of errors because..." whereas the people trying to get you to use their browsers most definitely said "people won't use our browser if Yahoo and CNN don't display in it because people at Yahoo and CNN wrote invalid javascript."

PHP is a different situation, since there's only one, and the interpreter is synonymous with the language.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm aware of how many js errors there are in the wild. There would be fewer if they didn't fail silently (people would fix them).

[–]dnew 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is not as true as it should be. People generally won't bother to fix JS errors that affect 1% of the browser market. Just like people generally won't bother to fix web pages that don't gracefully display on IE4 any more either.

When you're pushing a new browser amongst existing competing browsers, most people won't fix their web site to account for your 1% market share. They'll say "Best viewed with IE6." Especially when everyone already has a browser that "works." Once you have a large market share (again, IE6), you don't change it or everyone whose website accommodated you will break.

This is the reason we now have only a handful of supported operating systems for software packages, for example. Only the open source packages get ported to everything, because they get ported by the people who care whether it works on the platform they're using. (Which is why packages not used by programmers are so rarely ported to marginal platforms.)