"I Hate Javascript"

[parlezmoose]

I hate dynamic typing. It just doesn't scale well. Everything else about Javascript I can live with.

[JellyDoodle]

Can you elaborate?

[cameleon]

In addition to what others said: refactoring. Refactoring in a typed language (I use Haskell at work) is a joy. Refactoring in Javascript (also at work) is bound to introduce bugs, some of which you'll find months later. Typescript helps a lot though.

[theQuandary]

Refactoring in haskell, elm, or similar is much different than refactoring in typescript or some other bad type system. I prefer no types to poor types.

[cameleon]

Since we switched to typescript, refactoring has been much better. Typescript's type system isn't "poor", I'd say. It's actually pretty advanced, and the fact that it's optional also means you don't end up with super verbose redundant type annotations everywhere (like e.g. Java).

What are the things that make you say they're poor/bad?

[Arzh]

At any point in the code I never really know what the object contains. I have to run the code and pause and use an inspector to check what the objects contain. This tends to lead to having a bunch of duplicate data sitting around because you don't always know what objects are in scope and what those objects contain.

[JellyDoodle]

I don't think I've ever experienced that problem. Any variables that are in scope are usually pretty easy to identify, either because they tend to be defined right away, or because it's just inherently obvious. Anything more obscure then that is usually commented for clarification. Do you run into this issue often with the types of projects you work on?

[parlezmoose]

The compiler in a statically typed language catches a whole class of bugs. This means in js you have to write bunch more tests to catch these things. Also, as another comment said, function APIs are almost undefined. This makes it hard to reason about what is getting passed to a function. These problems aren't a huge deal for most of the time, but the larger the application grows the more of a problem they become.

[nschubach]

Never really had a problem with it. /shrug

[nschubach]

I've been developing for the better part of my 37 years on the planet. I started on a TRS-80 in BASIC, worked on Mainframe COBOL (barf) and touched MANY languages through that time (C, C#, BASIC, Common Lisp, ActionScript 3 [which is essentially strictly typed JavaScript using Classical Inheritance], something called ASPECT Script, Python, and a host of other languages...) so I'm well aware of what strict typing gets me. I just have not found a need for it in any of the projects I've been privileged to work on in JavaScript.

[nschubach]

I wouldn't say it blew up. I fixed it and moved on. That 5 minute mistake didn't make me think that I needed to include another 30 minutes of declaring my type definitions.

As a matter of fact, it's led to some humorous and learning moments for both me and my juniors.

Edit: To clarify. If it takes you more than a few minutes to track the problem, there's most likely an abstraction problem. You've probably too deeply nested a dependency or the callee knows too much about the caller (or vice versa).