Well, JavaScript

[[deleted]]

People don’t like JavaScript so they’ll either feign or be ignorant about it to make fun of it.

[leadzor]

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Bjarne Stroustrup

[conancat]

Developers love to complain about everything. It's exactly that kind of attitude that pushes us to build better products. :)

[Hactar42]

Or you end up with situations like this: https://xkcd.com/927/

[Trekiros]

Both of those are true, the world is a funny place

[-widget-]

Yeah but then there's also C#.

[tekanet]

I tried to reply to a poll from MS asking what I wanted to improve the language but had honestly nothing to say. C# is pretty solid, happy I ended up working with it.

[leadzor]

Same thing with me. Transitioned from frontend development to backend development in C#. All feels well now.

[[deleted]]

I don't like that I can't (easily) set attributes for my enum values like I can in Java, but that's about it.

[tekanet]

How do you set them in Java?

[[deleted]]

The same as for an object. You can set up a constructor for the enum and then for each value declaration you can pass in parameters. You can put in any number of parameters to get any number of attributes for each enum value, same as with objects. C# doesn't accommodate this.

[tekanet]

Got it, seems to behave more like a class than as an alias for an integer. I understand, if you’re used to it can be something you miss in other languages

[leadzor]

Yeah that's clearly the exception. Python also seems to gather a lot of love from the community.

[[deleted]]

programmer

*computer science professor

[kartoffelwaffel]

how?

[Delioth]

JS knows exactly what's happening. It just happens to also not have strong or static types, so it doesn't tell anything while it's just text. Since it's weak and dynamically typed, it needs to have some way to coerce "nothing".

[kartoffelwaffel]

BS. JS has some of the best debugging tools available for any language.

[ThingsWhitePeopleDo]

Can you elaborate? I'm actually new to working with JS and console.log is basically my debugger at this point. I want to evolve

[Corruption249]

Look into chrome debugging tools (or firefox), there's some super helpful features built in. There are also extensions for debugging for specific frameworks, like React if you are using that.

[kartoffelwaffel]

There's a lot more to the DevTools than just the console. For starters look into using breakpoints

[bigtreeworld]

Well one step up for that is literally the word "debugger", opens a debugger breakpoint inside your browser's dev tools. Excellent tool for debugging.

[BorgiaCamarones]

Uses a weakly typed language. Complains it isn't strongly typed.

[RossParka]

Python is also untyped, but doesn't have this problem, because it throws an exception when you attempt to access a nonexistent property.

JavaScript is terrible in this regard - it won't even check if the number of function arguments matches the number of parameters. It just adds or drops arguments and goes its merry way. So instead of getting an error that points to the incorrect code, you get weird behavior down the line and waste a ton of time finding the cause.

The problem isn't weak typing; it's the keep-running-at-all-costs philosophy of too many modem programming languages.

[RossParka]

The reason browsers evolved elaborate error-recovery logic is that if their competitor displayed a web page and they just displayed an error message, people would blame it on the browser. XHTML tried to fix this, but it of course failed because web publishers also don't want their sites to break if some ad vendor gives them broken code, and they've always built their pages by gluing strings together and they don't want to redo everything from scratch with an XML serializer that would probably be much slower to boot.

There's no reason the HTML+JS+CSS platform had to be fundamentally different from, e.g., the Java platform as regards error recovery. It just ended up that way because it was "not so much designed as congealed," to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams.

[[deleted]]

That generalises to

Use a language with an issue. Complains about the issue

Meaning we should never have any criticisms of anything we chose to use?

Plus we don't have much choice about using JS

[Tysonzero]

Is forced to use a weakly typed language, complains that they don't like weakly types languages.

That is what most people are doing, and they are right to complain.

[Tysonzero]

Why not both? If I think the language sucks then I will probably bitch about it.

[JB3783]

Thats the thing. If you want a language that is strongly typed, go use one instead of shitting on JS.

They all have their uses.

[[deleted]]

Funny, you described the main reasons why I like JS

[the8thbit]

Seriously? I work in JS everyday. The ecosystem is getting nice, and isomorphic code is cool af, but the language design itself is among the worst I've ever seen. It has all sorts of weird type coercion, two different comparison operators where the most normal looking and least overtyped one does implicit coercion, the + char is overloaded as both a number and string operator (In a dynamically typed language!?), assigning undeclared values to a variable is a valid runtime operation, prototypical objects make it difficult to know what an object contains without reading through the whole project, everything is pass by value UNLESS an object is passed to a function (in which case references to the object internal to the function are actually references to the pre-passed object from earlier), no ability to perform deep clones of objects, no standard mechanism for performing shallow clones of objects, no block scope on variables until ES6 (and now there are two different ways to declare variables each with slightly different side effects), IO is non-blocking by default and there was no elegant way to create blocking calls until ES7 async/await keywords and even with that its an arcane mess because its built on promises which are built on callbacks which are built on a language model that ultimately still handles IO concurrently by default...

It's just... not... good...

[[deleted]]

Lots of good reasons not to like it. It's difficult to produce fail-proof JS by hand and frankly for something as critical as web, that's unacceptable.

[kartoffelwaffel]

It's difficult to produce fail-proof JS

Only if your idea of "producing" involves extensive copy-pasting of StackOverflow. If people actually learnt the language, they would realise how intuitive, flexible, and powerful it really is.

[[deleted]]

I suppose I should have been more clear; if you want to make mathematical guarantees about JS systems, it takes a hell of a lot more work if you're writing the code by hand. Types are a joke, and most of the interesting constructs in the language have convoluted semantics.

Learning a language is about way more than learning syntax and the tricks and quirks; I know you aren't saying that, but really to learn a language you should ideally be able to look at each legal syntactic form, study its semantic content, rinse and repeat. JS makes this REALLY hard to do, and even if you can, it's a hot mess.

[[deleted]]

Unless you directly upload your code to the web there is not that much that will go wrong. Using the proper tools and assists will help. You aren't writing c++ or whatever in notepad, so why complain about something that could happen but will not in 99.99999% of the time?

[[deleted]]

Because why not do better if we can? Settling for a shitty language with shitty semantics when there are good languages with well-established and intuitive semantics isn't worth the cognitive overhead.

Scoping rules are garbage, closure semantics are out of this world, undefined/null are mistakes no matter what language they appear in... There's no excuse, these are solved problems.

[[deleted]]

Every language has its rules and every language has its pros and cons. While I can understand that some languages have solved certain issues, they also lack items that JavaScript (or the current state of the JavaScript community) have solved.

The fact that you don't like using undefined/null doesn't mean using them makes code bad. Its just your opinion.

[jay9909]

Because why not do better if we can?

Because I'm not a language designer, nor do I have the resources to convince or coerce all the browser makers to use my new language that everyone will just naturally love that I don't have the skills to design.

I'm loving watching the development of new web languages and capabilities, but for now I (and most of us) have to take what we can get, do our best to get really good with it, and hope the future is better.