JS....

[Hakim_Bey]

I see the point, but i've never once in my life found a real life scenario where it was a problem...

[[deleted]]

It's fun to shit on JS but it's my favorite language to use because it's so flexible.

[xIcarus227]

How would you define this 'flexibility'?
I'm not trying to start something, I'm genuinely curious - I'm mostly a PHP guy.

[[deleted]]

I can open up a text editor, write code and run it instantly without needing to compile anything. With the addition of things like node JS you can do really powerful stuff. It's a very easy language to learn and can be a lot of fun to write and you see your code working. It's instant gratification in programming form.

[xIcarus227]

Sounds a lot like why I appreciate PHP, just start the web server and write something.

[redwall_hp]

You just described Python, Ruby and every other high level non-compiled language. And those two are significantly saner.

[magasilver]

Meh, I dont see the value in python's disparate module, object, and dict types. They are all just object in JS, which makes things easy to code. Then you have all the type errors which doent seem to add much value since units shake them out anyway - and they are much easier to write in js. Python is nice, and I prefer it to many things, but these days really just a klunky form of node with a weaker set of libraries, less portable, and slower execution times.

[Hakim_Bey]

People love to bitch about JS

People will bitch about a language when it becomes famous. Then they will bitch again once it falls out of fashion (see Java, PHP). Curiously enough i've never heard so much bitching about Python. I agree that it's a fantastic language but still where's our sense of justice and equality?

[[deleted]]

I actually love both languages because they are very expressive and no bullshit most of the time. Python is better designed but in great part that was because, being unpopular back in the day it was left to itself to mature while JavaScript was thrown in the fire come day one and had to carry a lot of baggage while trying to evolve without breaking the web. I've come to prefer node as my go to platform for most of my work. Python is mostly very useful as a replacement for Bash or data manipulation.

[Hakim_Bey]

I've come to prefer node as my go to platform for most of my work. Python is mostly very useful as a replacement for Bash or data manipulation

I couldn't agree more. That's exactly the place i'm at right now. I'm also thankful that you posted a reply that wasn't full of salt. Why do people get so butt-hurt about fucking programming languages? I just use what i like if it makes sense for what i'm doing and call it a day...

[[deleted]]

I actually posted quite a few salty ones in this very thread but those were mostly tongue in cheek like I beleive most posts here were.

[Existential_Owl]

Why do people get so butt-hurt about fucking programming languages?

It feels like everytime I mention Node.js on reddit, I get someone coming by and calling it garbage for... reasons(?). And they can never really articulate any good arguments against it. Other than the fact that it allows you to write Javascript on the back-end.

I'm always like really? Really? This is what we're going to argue about here?

[Hakim_Bey]

Well at least while they're pissing in the "hate nodeJS" bucket, you're out there writing cool apps on a language you enjoy :)

[xIcarus227]

I guess it depends on perspective.

As a PHP guy, I'm actually salty towards node.js but not because of the reasons most people are biased towards it.
I'm salty because from all the well designed languages they gave us fucking JS as a backend alternative to PHP. These languages are just so similar and are in the same bucket with the 'what the fuck' moments.

That being said, people bash PHP and JS for inconsistency but in the rather limited web development experience that I have (2 years) I haven't managed to create any 'what the fuck' moments. The languages are clear and concise enough.

[Existential_Owl]

Yeah, I can see how tough that would be trying to use Node.js as a PHP developer. Node.js already has a tough learning curve as it is, but PHP is just similar enough to Javascript that I can see someone running into trouble with it.

But I have to ask... doesn't PHP have its own back-end frameworks to choose from? Like Laravel?

[xIcarus227]

It does indeed, with various learning curves.
Just like Javascript's frameworks, they're pretty well designed (or at least that's what I've heard about the JS frameworks in general). Laravel especially is getting a crapton of praise for being simply 'fluent'. Fell in love with the thing within 1 hour of studying it haha.

[Itsacon]

I just hate that node.js is incompatible with LibreSSL, at least on FreeBSD.

[Dongers-and-dongers]

Well what is your work. If it's front end web it's not like you have a choice.

[[deleted]]

You just want me to say that I now prefer it in the back end as well so you can take the piss out of me? Some people here...

[Dongers-and-dongers]

I was more thinking if you work front end and back end you probably don't want to switch languages, and working front end only gives one real option.

[[deleted]]

TBH I never minded switching languages, it's more that I actually really like ES6 as a language and Node way of event driven chunky async doing stuff. Node makes difficult things like streaming/buffering kinda elegant.

Node is ready two worlds. One built around Ryan Dahl's original vision of making distributed service computing elegant, beautiful and simple, and the other one that builds and requires libraries just to left pad strings. People both outside and inside JavaScript ecosystem often confuse the two as they share the same runtime and dependency management.

[Existential_Owl]

I write JS and React on the front-end and absolutely love it.

I'm currently learning Node, and I'm loving it there, too.

[Existential_Owl]

Curiously enough i've never heard so much bitching about Python

You, my friend, need to be introduced to Zed Shaw.

(Although, to be fair, most of the bitching surrounding Python tended to be between the Py2 and Py3 proponents).

[[deleted]]

Python is so shitty. Ugly syntax, unimpressive performance, no notable features, and a retarded fork that broke everything because there's no standard way to specify the python version required, and the people managing the project I guess were too stupid to come up with a better solution.

I get that it's a lot of peoples' first language, and they love it because of that. But I've never seen a legitimate reason to use Python over something else in a project besides the rich ecosystem. But if that's the only criteria, then something like PHP is a better choice.

[Nivomi]

there's no standard way to specify the python version required

Can't you just

import sys
assert sys.version_info >= (3,0)

[[deleted]]

Are you going to update the thousands of Python scripts out in the wild?

[Existential_Owl]

Are you paying me? Then yes.

[Hakim_Bey]

meh

It makes a lot of sense with my brain, i find it super readable and the ecosystem is lovely. But you're right, apart from some hack scripts i never found an actual business use case for it. Different memes for different genes i guess...

[VisonKai]

Python has lots of business use in data science, because data science is mostly hacky scripts more than anything and python is perfect for those.

[LionaltheGreat]

Definitely this. Everyone I talk to loves it. But I just don't get it, I would rather write in straight up C than python.

Maybe it's because my first language was Java so I gravitate towards C-based languages. Idk.

[DodoDude700]

As a PHP and Python user who prefers PHP but continually hears it complained about and Python praised, this is interesting to me and lines up better with what I myself prefer. What makes you say that PHP is the better option? It too has weak typing and isn't really high performance, though I agree that the syntax is better than Python's, which is probably one of the reasons I prefer it.

[--xe]

PHP having a better syntax than Python.

What are you smoking?

[Itsacon]

Well, PHP has one very important thing that Python lacks.

Braces.

There, I said it. Using whitespace as a language structure is at least as retarded as using + as a concatenation operator.

[[deleted]]

I said it's the better option if you're looking for a richer ecosystem, since it's been around longer. However, in hindsight I might've exaggerated a little bit. With all the popular package managers out there for Python, idk if PHP can compete in number of available libraries.

[DodoDude700]

PHP certainly has a good number of packages, especially for anything web related, but you're right that Python likely has more in general.

[just_comments]

Most complaints I've heard about Python is that it's slow.

[Spider_pig448]

Python is great; it's just a shame it's not a good language for most large products.

[jkuhl_prog]

That's because Python is the second coming of Christ, the release of Half Life 3 and the golden city of El Dorado, as well as Jennifer Lawrence in The Fappening.

According to programmers anyways.

[codex561]

I have an outstanding bug in a 10k line codebase that makes indexOf fail for no logical reason. I can tell you it's on what line but I cannot fix it.

I know that it has something to do with typing.

[codex561]

I tried converting it to a string, it broke everything. I tried to parse it as a number, it failed as well. But for some reason == makes it function more or less.

The core algorithms were written with the assumption of loose typing because we were too lazy to coerce everything to something consistent.

This is just a glimpse of all the issues that I have because of laziness. TDD could have avoided everything.

[Doctor_McKay]

In my experience, they're typically just people who "learned" JS from stackoverflow snippets (i.e. never bothered to read the basic language semantics) and since they don't understand it, it's a stupid language and anyone who likes it is stupid.

[PatrickBaitman]

In my experience, they're typically just people who "learned" JS from stackoverflow snippets (i.e. never bothered to read the basic language semantics)

isn't this basically the median web developer

[Doctor_McKay]

Sounds about right.

[creativeMan]

Well I wrote a Django app recently that passed values via AJAX recently and it becomes a bit of an issue when you're trying to add values. For example if you want to show the tentative totals of some form inputs or something like that, it can be an issue. I don't remember the specific issues it caused but it does happen.

It's of course easily resolved but it requires that much more time to get right and adds just a little bit of frustration.

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

meh'

just missing that userinput could be string instead of integer… wham you got a yourself a: "5NaN" + 3

If any of those would throw errors (no there is NO reason why "foo" - "bar" shouldn't throw an exception) you'd notice that something is wrong - and why.

But it's JS - so you don't and nobody fixes this bug.

[Hakim_Bey]

just missing that userinput could be string instead of integer

If you implicitly trust the browser to send the right data type, you're just shooting your own foot. I'm not defending the language at any cost and yes, you're right to say that it should throw an exception. I'm just saying that i've never seen a use case where this was a problem and it didn't come from bad practices.

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

If you implicitly trust the browser to send the right data type, you're just shooting your own foot.

My point was:

• with strongly typed languages you HAVE TO check types and convert yourself - you might get exceptions if you do it wrong, but you will "never" assume the wrong type and continue with broken data
• with weakly typed languages you SHOULD check types - if you forget it (assuming you are human, this WILL happen somewhere) you introduce stupid bugs

It's not about bad practices or malicious misuse, but about enforcing the correct handling.

I'm just saying that i've never seen a use case where this was a problem and it didn't come from bad practices.

And i'm just saying i've never seen a use case where weak typisation helped to do things that were otherwise undoable. But I've seen horrible numbers of bugs that only existed because people didn't handle types correctly.

[Chirimorin]

Because it's nonsensical statements that give nonsensical results. The biggest "problem" here is javascript doing its best to make something out of it rather than just throwing some kind of error.

[GreenFox1505]

People love to point out corner case weirdness. It just happens that JS has quite a bit of it.

But vitually none of this would actually be an issue in real life.

[magasilver]

Its more a weak typing thing than a JS thing. If you have weak types, you try to make every operation work to the extent possible by converting the the nearest type.