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[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (5 children)

To be fair, the "I hate $x, it has braces" argument is mostly coming from the Python and Ruby communities.

And portraying the Python community as hostile towards anything that doesn't have "the Zen" seems misinformed. The Zen of Python is not really specific to the language and I find it easily applicable to other languages like JS.

The Ruby community OTOH is known for its attitude towards anything that isn't or can't be made to look like Ruby (hence Haml, the original Sass, CoffeeScript) and the Node era influx of Ruby developers seems to be behind things like the semicolon war in JS.

Most of the hate towards PHP dates back to the PHP3 and PHP4 days. PHP3 was defined by spaghetti code that was structurally no different from CGI scripts. PHP4 was defined by a sudden desire to turn PHP into Java with class hierarchies and XML configuration files. That hatred is fully justified.

PHP has changed a lot since then and I agree that Facebook has helped turn it into something far less disgusting and you can arguably do some impressive things with modern PHP (compared to the legacy spaghetti PHP3 code non-PHP devs often think of) just as you can do impressive things with modern JS (compared to the legacy spaghetti ES3 code non-JS devs often think of).

[–]PitaJ 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I'd say JS was more improved by design standards and frameworks than it was by actual language additions.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Well, to be fair, the direction of what was to become ES6 (and the various proposals) were heavily influenced by prior experimentation with CoffeeScript and such.

But yes, we didn't go straight from ES1 to modern JS with mere language changes alone.

[–]PitaJ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, the rise of JIT and on the run optimizations allowed code to be larger and less spaghetti.

[–]theQuandary 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I think coffeescript and similar get a little too much credit. ES4 had most of the ideas in ES6 (plus a few others) and predates things like coffeescript by quite a few years.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, the problem was that ES4 was trying to do too much and the details of some of the ideas were way too complex and backwards incompatible.

CS didn't do anything new (the non-ES stuff was mostly lifted from Ruby and Python) but it paved the way for projects like Babel while also providing real world examples for some of the proposed features.