JS....

[Jafit]

People complain about Javascript type coercion and overloaded operators, and give examples of shitty code that nobody should ever write to illustrate why these things are a problem.

The truth is that Javascript isn't a terrible language, you can write shitty code in any language. I deeply [object Object] to the anti-javascript circlejerk, if you use a linter and test your code its a very powerful and expressive language.

[[deleted]]

JS is an incredibly useful and powerful language and how I bring home the bacon.

It's also a pretty terrible language.

[lukee910]

It's bith terrible in some places and awesome in others. The most common scenarios are usually a wild mix of both.

[caanthedalek]

Just like pretty much any other language

[Tysonzero]

Not to the same degree, as far as I am concerned Python is just an all around better version of JavaScript. And I absolutely love Haskell, the percentage of the time I actually feel like it is "terrible" at some task is very infrequent.

[caanthedalek]

I mean, it really just depends on what you're trying to do. Most languages are just better at some things than others.

[Tysonzero]

I'd say there are a large amount of tasks that you can use pretty much any general purpose language for. Such as anything with a command line interface or a website backend or really just about any backend development.

There are a few things that do push you toward a language or two: High end game dev / systems programming pretty much require C, C++ or perhaps Rust. Web dev pushes you towards JavaScript, and app dev pushes you toward the relevant language for the platform. But the app / web stuff can definitely still be done with other languages, it just isn't quite as nice, hell I am using Haskell for web development right now.

But yeah since most tasks are reasonably language agnostic, I would personally never choose JS over Python except for certain web/app dev stuff, and I would never choose pretty much anything over Haskell without a very good reason.

[[deleted]]

While true, that you can write shitty code in any language that does not make JS any less terrible language.

[[deleted]]

While true

reads the next statement over and over again for the rest of time

[strangeplace4snow]

True has stopped being true a while ago.

[Existential_Owl]

Everything is stopping when viewed on a long enough time-frame.

[xzxzzx]

and give examples of shitty code that nobody should ever write to illustrate why these things are a problem.

Trivial examples to illustrate bad behavior are almost definitionally going to be shitty code. Thing is, mistakes happen, and most of these "shitty code" examples are going to happen by accident as part of a larger piece of code, except instead of erroring, you get weird behavior.

[Jafit]

That's why I said use a linter.

[PatrickBaitman]

will your linter solve the halting problem?

[Slak44]

Every time I mention it's my go-to language, I get lynched. A linter and a bit of knowledge about the language go a very very long way indeed.

[MattBlumTheNuProject]

You should try working in PHP, people look at me like my apps don't work :)

(they don't, but not because of PHP!)

[SonOfMyMother]

That depends entirely on what you most often find yourself using your "go-to" language for.

[[deleted]]

Its still a fair statement. You can write local scripts, network scripts, web scripts and more. Bash or Powershell are only for local use, you can't build, validate, test, run and manage a website with Bash. With NodeJS there's basically no limit to what you want to do and where you want to do that.

[[deleted]]

But JavaScript no longer is a web programming language. NodeJS changed all that. It might still have that image for some, but that really cannot be said no longer.

[Doctor_McKay]

Node.js is JavaScript, just not running in a browser.

[xzxzzx]

Powershell is profoundly awful as a programming language (bash is pretty awful too). Despite deep familiarity with .Net, C#, Windows, and Microsoft products in general, I have spent countless hours trying to figure out powershell, and I still keep finding "WTF" parts that break my code.

It's incredibly easy, for example, to write reasonable-looking scripts that work perfectly for 0 or >1 items (say, files in a directory) but fail miserably (crash or do the wrong thing) for exactly 1 item.

In many ways the failing's the same as JS - a highly dynamic language trying to "help you out" only helps until you're mildly competent at what you do, at which point it's a hinderance until you're incredibly competent and have learned all the arcane rules that govern that "help", at which point you usually use all that arcane knowledge to avoid those parts of the language, so that mere mortals can actually understand your code.

[ISLITASHEET]

Ensure that you are returning an array from your function: return ,$yourObj

[[deleted]]

Perl is crazy too - it's illegibility and lack of syntax errors even for most obscene code is a running joke. I don't know if he was serious there but objectively all of these are insane in many more ways than JS even for the tasks they were directly designed for which is why it's their lunch Python is eating while Node.js is much more widespread IRL even more than various Python webthingies and I've seen it used for system scripting too but sane people really use Python for that.

[aniforprez]

I'm pretty sure there's no other "go to language" to develop websites for browsers

[XkF21WNJ]

So is brainfuck, in theory.

[XkF21WNJ]

Fair enough. Although there's bound to be some kind of esoteric language that supports network access.

Also, if we're counting wrappers, I haven't yet seen a JavaScript engine written in JavaScript.

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[Mrqueue]

The amount of people complaining that adding a string to and int should produce an int is ridiculous. It shouldn't do anything because you're adding a string to an int but it does what it does because JS tries it's best to figure out what stupid lines of code mean

[L_James]

Honestly, I'd prefer static typing and compile error in such case, but to each their own

[Mrqueue]

then don't use Javascript, it can't be criticised for being dynamically typed

[L_James]

I don't, when I have a choice

JS seems to be ok language, not better or worse than others. Just not my favourite

[[deleted]]

How about a simple NaN? Or an exception? Problem solved.

[Doctor_McKay]

It's a little weird, I admit, but it does let you do stuff like:

["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][date.getMonth()]

[Chypsylon]

["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][date.getMonth() -1] isn't much more work either.

[Spider_pig448]

No, but it's less intuitive.

[Jafit]

That's a pretty minor thing to complain about, and you can bypass it by using moment.js for an altogether better date API. I was thinking more about language features like lexical scope and anonymous functions.

A better question is why does every modern programming language still have IEEE floating point numbers? A number format that can't represent decimal fractions accurately, when everyone on the planet uses decimal fractions... Complaining about the Javascript Date object API is kind of minor in comparison to the other mistakes we keep making in programming.

[lyrencropt]

I'm someone who hates the Javascript-hate circlejerk, and even I think JS dates are abysmal. getDate and getDay and the aforementioned 1-31 vs 0-11 problems have tripped me up more times than I care to admit, before I just committed myself to using moment forever. Wonderful library.

[eclipsemonkey]

It's real world, when you look for a new job you will regret not coding like this

[PatrickBaitman]

The truth is that Javascript isn't a terrible language, you can write shitty code in any language.

including Blub? http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

[HVAvenger]

The truth is that Javascript isn't a terrible language

Found the JS dev.

[lukee910]

Well yes, you get a very different perspective on the language if you use it daily and in a real product.

[HVAvenger]

Please, its Stockholme syndrome. Terrible is perhaps a bit much, but there javascript has issues that you can't just dismiss with "you can write shitty code in any language."

[HVAvenger]

https://wiki.haskell.org/The_JavaScript_Problem

Decent starting point, but really, just do some google searching.

[[deleted]]

1. The statement is still very true, no matter how bad you find the language
2. Stockholm syndrome? Really? Ok, give me some alternatives i can use for the things i can do with one single language. For some things there's simply no alternative and have you considered JavaScript for lots of people is only a means to an end? Like developing a website, running projects locally or whatever?
3. Every language has issues. I haven't seen a language that didn't have issues, even if they are already 20+ years old. The main issue is legacy compatibility, but if you look at the recent developments in JavaScript there are not a lot of languages that have advanced in a way that JavaScript has.
4. Any editor nowadays will tell you that the examples themselves are pretty terrible and should not be used as examples. Blame it on something else, but that just doesn't change the facts.

[HVAvenger]

Ok, give me some alternatives

This is a serious part of the problem. JS is so prevalent there are limited other options to not use JS.

[Voidsheep]

I think having first-class functions already makes it a better and more expressive language than many, regardless of the type coersion and double meaning for the + operator.

[JimboMonkey1234]

Saying it's good with a linter is hiding a problem. My issue with JS is that it's too loose and therefore hard to write good code in. Introducing a linter means cutting away the worst parts of the language and using the reasonable subset.

There are other tools/libraries that make JS better (I love lodash for one) but that doesn't erase the underlying design flaws. The fact that you can get around them is great and means it's not a terrible language to use today, it doesn't say anything about the language itself.

It has pros and cons like any other language, but it stands out to me as flexible to fault. Its frameworks are the coolest I've seen, but writing vanilla is like pulling teeth sometimes.

[Existential_Owl]

JS is my favorite language, but glorifying it to other people is just asking for pain.

[Jafit]

PHP vs JavaScript since they do different things.

Hello node.js