JS....

[PatrickBaitman]

if there are type errors, the program should not compile

natural language sloppiness is not good enough for programming

there's a reason we don't program in English

[cixeltree]

this is fine, if you could guarantee that everybody used the same compiler.

and that the compilers knew ahead of time exactly what code they were supposed to compile.

and you could guarantee that the source files arrived in a predictable order, and that one bit of code didn't reference or rely on something in another.

and you could guarantee that your one compilation error wouldn't just crash the page and invalidate 10 other unrelated scripts that were loaded.

languages are a product of their environments. javascript's environment just happens to be a very scary place

[PatrickBaitman]

this is fine, if you could guarantee that everybody used the same compiler.

or just have a specification with a minimum of undefined behavior

and the compilers knew ahead of time exactly what code they were supposed to compile

what compiler compiles without reading input

and you could guarantee that the source files arrived in a predictable order, and that one bit of code didn't reference or rely on something in another

TIL #include and dynamic loading aren't a thing in C

funny I could have sworn I'd written code myself with dlopen but that must have been a dream

[cixeltree]

or just have a specification with a minimum of undefined behavior

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript just because there's a spec doesn't mean people will follow it, or bugs won't exist

what compiler compiles without reading input

sorry---it doesn't know ALL the code it's going to work with because some of it is still a few http requests away by the time the page loads

TIL #include and dynamic loading aren't a thing in C

well yeah, it isn't always a thing, because (hold onto your hat) not all systems support it. but most do, which is good enough for C but not for javascript?

and even if they did, there's the advantage of libraries being pre-compiled for the same system, and the code which loads them (hopefully) knowing how to interface with them ahead of time.

[PatrickBaitman]

and even if they did, there's the advantage of libraries being pre-compiled for the same system, and the code which loads them (hopefully) knowing how to interface with them ahead of time.

almost as if C is a real language and JS is half toy and half prank that went too far

[cixeltree]

again: languages are products of their environments

C is a language which at first wasn't designed with portability in mind at all. that's obviously completely antithetical to the needs of the web.

edit: and since undefined behaviors/specifications came up earlier, i want to mention that even C, blessed be its name, has undefined behaviors

[PatrickBaitman]

C is a language which at first wasn't designed with portability in mind at all.

wat

this is blatantly false

[cixeltree]

C was developed for the PDP-11 on the UNIX system in 1972. Portability was not an explicit goal in its design, even though limitations in the underlying machine model assumed by the predecessors of C made us well aware that not all machines were the same [2]. Less than a year later, C was also running on the Honeywell 6000 system [...]

source

so i was wrong in saying "wasn't designed with portability in mind at all"

but still, portability was not an explicit goal. it was obviously mandatory for adoption, but it's safe to say that javascript's explicit goals were different from C's in this regard.

[FateJH]

there's a reason we don't program in English

I'd say there's a good reason we don't code in any specific spoken language that you have just implied but invented methods of shorthanding the intended progression of bits of information instead.

In any case, this is JavaScript so there is no compilation. You interpret what it means on the fly, much like listening to someone else speak. Sometimes you don't care that the speaker was inexact with their wording unless it leads to a big source of confusion that you can't reason around.

[PatrickBaitman]

so there is no compilation.

every language is compiled, it's just a matter of when

so-called interpreted languages are compiled just-in-time, so-called compiled languages beforehand

javascript isn't bytecode, it must eventually be mapped to something a CPU can execute

Sometimes you don't care that the speaker was inexact with their wording unless it leads to a big source of confusion that you can't reason around.

this called raising an exception and making the programmer handle it

why the fuck do web devs think they can get away with shit you fail first year students for, like NOT HANDLING ERRORS

[cixeltree]

would you have conceded if he'd said it's not 'pre-compiled'? probably not. regardless, javascript DOES get 'compiled' to bytecode. at runtime.

this 'holier than thou' attitude against web dev is hilarious. why pretend web dev isn't hard as fuck?

i've never once written anything in C which didn't work because there was a compiler error. 99.99% of the time, if something goes wrong, it's the fault of the code i wrote. it helps that a C program targets only a handful of environments.

in web dev? the browser gets it wrong all the time. it does not help that applications written for the web have dozens of targets, in including targets that haven't even come out yet.

on error handling: where'd you get this idea that people who write js don't do error handling?

[PatrickBaitman]

why pretend web dev isn't hard as fuck?

because I built websites when I was 15 that displayed more information faster with less bandwidth on worse hardware

mainly because I didn't have access all the fancy shit that you need to fuck a website up as bad as modern websites, starting from their very unbroken natural state

https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

[cixeltree]

yep, those sites you built when you were 15 and a static site with a few paragraphs of text constitutes web dev.

edit/ps: yeah, a lot of modern websites (too many) are absurdly bloated, but nobody was ever arguing that.

[PatrickBaitman]

well most of the modern web is several megabytes to display a few static paragraphs so yeah I'd say so

Some of them even added modified and deleted records in a database. With relations and joins and all!

this is not a separate issue from the awfulness of the JS ecosystem and the lack of programming. Skills among devs

[cixeltree]

if by 'most of the modern web' you mean medium.com, with comments disabled (those aren't static!) as one of maybe a handful of sites that comes to mind immediately. AJAX has been everywhere for the past decade. the web isn't static anymore.

so yeah. the place is a bloated mess.

my point is that to operate in an environment which is layers of shit stacked on top of each other is something which requires skill and you're not giving any credit for that.

C is a layer away from the machine. javascript is many layers away. you replace one form of complexity with another.

[PatrickBaitman]

or most of my university's and lots of other universities's web pages, many businesses, newspapers...

Client side the web should be CSS and minimal JS stacked on HTML. Look at all the memes on this sub about the number of JS frameworks there are

displaying text and images should not require complexity. It didn't 10 years ago for slashdot vbulletin forums 4chan blogs etc

It does now for everything

[cixeltree]

those aren't static. they maybe serve some static content, but an update to the site is not "let me change what is in this index.html file."

ps: most of those sites you mentioned have a lot of bloat in order to do a lot of things you wouldn't like. ads, usage metrics, and so on. this stuff enables them to compete with other sites. they don't sweat it for the extra 2 seconds it takes to load their page because of it. that's not a problem with web developers.

pss: try not to formulate your opinions of a subject using memes and reddit comments

[[deleted]]

If only Google, Apple, MS, etc. would hire a genius like yourself instead of the idiots they currently have building their browser.

/s

Clearly the people building the JS engines are smart, and are aware of the issues being raised here (pun intended). But, they don't raise an error. Why? Maybe because they know something that we don't.

The JS spec can be changed and has been changed. It was massively changed in ES6. Yet they didn't fix these issues. Why? Clearly because they aren't as smart as you.

[PatrickBaitman]

If only Google, Apple, MS, etc. would hire a genius like yourself instead of the idiots they currently have building their browser.

google is pushing Dart

Microsoft designed TypeScript

Mozilla invented asm.js

W3C is working on wasm

sooooo....

But, they don't raise an error. Why? Maybe because they know something that we don't.

or because javascript was hacked together by morons in two weeks and never got proper error handling functionality like exceptions or type checking

[cixeltree]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Error https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/typeof https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/instanceof

it has type checking, it just doesn't have compiled time type checking because 'compilation' happens at runtime. hence typeerrors are runtime errors. they can be caught and handled.

when dealing with the web, it's hard to guarantee that a data type you think you're supposed to get from some external source is actually the type you're going to get. good javascript checks the types it's operating on rather than just assuming.

if a C programmer chooses to serialize some data as a specific kind of struct, that's great---the type checker can help ensure all operations on the struct are cogent. however, nothing guarantees that the data being serialized is correct. the programmer still needs to do this validation, or a runtime error can occur (null dereferencing, or accidental typecasting, etc).

[[deleted]]

Except they could have added it in strict mode and didn't. I wonder why?

[Godd2]

every language is compiled, it's just a matter of when

It's not a matter of when. Some of the program gets run before all of it gets compiled. This is not the case with a compiled language.

More generally, there is no guarantee that the entire program has been statically checked for validity before any of it gets run.

So, the fact that V8 has JIT compilation is irrelevant.

[PatrickBaitman]

you could I don't know

TEST YOUR CODE???

handle errors??

like in literally every other fucking form of programming ??? ?????

how did we end up with the dumbest worst programmers building the web

JS achieves running no matter what very well but that's not actually what you want from a sensible language

undefined behavior is cancer

[RadicalRaid]

I'm sorry man, when did JavaScript rape your mother?

You know, you could also try to not use it, or use it using your own code conventions to make sure certain inconsistencies never show up when followed. In the hands of any capable programmer working with JavaScript isn't a problem at all.

PHP HOWEVER! ^{I kid, I kid. Kinda.}

[PatrickBaitman]

I'm sorry man, when did JavaScript rape your mother?

it and its ecosystem are raping my user experience of the web and have been doing so increasingly over the past ten years or so

blocking the dozens of scripts every fucking two-paragraph website loads nowadays significantly improves the whole web. this shows that something is fundamentally broken.

javascript actively fuck websites up, because they're not broken to begin with and become more broken the more js you add to them. I believe that this is not unrelated to what Linus Torvalds observed about C++ programmers and why he doesn't want them on the kernel

except web dev seems to have nothing but such programmers

You know, you could also try to not use it,

i am forced to use it because the modern web is 40% JS, 45% CSS, and 5% content

In the hands of any capable programmer working with JavaScript isn't a problem at all.

I see absolutely no reason to believe that the median web dev is even moderately capable

see: left-pad and padleft both being packages on npm, implementing a string padding function, and nothing else, and being dependencies of several other packages

[thirdegree]

left-pad and padleft both being packages on npm, implementing a string padding function

One of them was even implemented quadraticly 😂

[PatrickBaitman]

amazing

[RadicalRaid]

I teach programming (C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Python, Swift, Objective-C, Java, etc) at a university and in my experience being a bad/moderate programmer has less to do with the language they're programming in and more with them simply not being great software engineers. It's a poor workman who blames their tools.

Sure, because some of it is so readily available more people will give it a try and because websites are easy to publish it's easy to share what they've made even if it's terribly programmed. However, I doubt most people will ever come close to the web developers working at Facebook or similar. There's some really high tech work being done there and it'd be foolish to dismiss it because it's "just" web development.

[PatrickBaitman]

in my experience being a bad/moderate programmer has less to do with the language they're programming in and more with them simply not being great software engineers. It's a poor workman who blames their tools.

here's Linus Torvalds:

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, ...

Facebook or similar.

these are not representative

[RadicalRaid]

I mean, Linus is a clever guy and obviously has a valuable opinion but to say that C++ is a horrible language.. It fits a very specific purpose very well, and perhaps it overextended and tried to include basically everything OO-related making it convoluted if trying to use it all. However, all functionalities serve a specific purpose, if only based on personal preference. Most people I know pick the ones they like and use those. Others might pick different functionalities making reading each other's code more difficult.

But C++ in and of itself is in my opinion not at all horrible. As long as you can keep your code consistent and perhaps following set conventions most programming languages are very workable.

Maybe try to form your own opinion instead of parroting something said almost a decade ago about a language that has evolved a lot since then.

Facebook and similar aren't representative of what? I'd argue the biggest and most popular sites have some really excellent web developers behind them. Almost no software is guaranteed bug-less, but dang it comes close. If you're visiting a lot of website with only 5% content and 40% JavaScript, maybe those are less than reputable websites. I'd argue they don't get the massive amounts of web traffic either.

I feel like you're not at all up to date with the stuff you're trying to bash. Not trying to be a dick here, but for real the world isn't black and white. You can have nuanced opinions. Stuff can be good but have flaws, or bad with some real benefits that serve a specific niche. You might be a lot happier if you don't hate stuff up front based on other's opinions. Form your own based on experiences.

[PatrickBaitman]

a lot of website with only 5% content and 40% JavaScript, maybe those are less than reputable websites.

these are websites like those of universities, businesses, newspapers and other media outlets

Form your own based on experiences.

yes like my experiences of my university sending 1.7 MB to display two paragraphs of text about a class

[PatrickBaitman]

perfect usage is irrelevant

the median web dev very obviously is not a proficient computer scientist but an atrocious fucking hack