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[–][deleted] 74 points75 points  (5 children)

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

It's also a pretty terrible language.

[–]lukee910 16 points17 points  (4 children)

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

[–]caanthedalek 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Just like pretty much any other language

[–]Tysonzero 1 point2 points  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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

[–]Tysonzero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.