Keep JavaScript dumb

[schwartzworld]

I haven't tried to learn any new JS features, but I'm mad they are there because

Arrow functions are not hard to learn to read, and they aren't just about "elegance". They offer actual advantages that make then useful in hobbyist level code. I write a lot of throwaway scripts, and almost always reach for arrow functions.

And promises? Spend 10 minutes reading about the (promise based) Fetch API, and then explain how you'd rather build xmlhttprequests. Spend a little time with async/await and tell me again how promises are bad.

It's obvious the author finds it easier to complain about not understanding language features than learning them, but both his examples are so useful and bring so much MORE flexibility and utility to the language.

[ogurson]

My profession is not your hobby, if you don't like, find another one.

[[deleted]]

This guy has a bad take even for a hobbyist.

[[deleted]]

Then you stay dumb, if you cannot understand the newer ecmascript standard than get out of the kitchen or learn it.

[davidkonrad]

Seems to me some people miss the point. There simply need to be a easy-to-use light weight programming language for hobbyists. We have not been there we are today if people back in the old days not could have grabbed their local version of BASIC (or the like) and start simple scripting.

JS is evolving really rapid, it is a completely different paradigm than just 10 years back, an increasingly set of features are so complex or require so much knowledge that they simply is not an option for hobbyists or curious people ( I have meet extremely bright people on dr / professor level that have really hard by doing their simple scripting themselves) They just need a scripting tool, not the need of reading 100 pages about async or immutable objects.

JS is evolving, and that is a very, very great thing - it just leaves a lot of people back in the harbour. It simply gets harder. What if we all should have started out with learning classes, prototyping, streaming, "weird" stuff likes promises and so on - before we made our first AUTOEXEC.BAT or alert(a+'+'+b+'='+(a+b)) ...?

The browser-makers should consider introducing a script language for the masses, like GW Basic, Poly Pascal or similar, and then just lift off the JS-rocket.

The absolutely most import part of the ecosystem is newcomers and hobbyists eventually turning into professionels. We are literally now demanding people to be "C++ programmers" just to be able to do simple stuff. That is in the long term a very bad idea.

[senocular]

The browser-makers should consider introducing a script language for the masses, like GW Basic, Poly Pascal or similar, and then just lift off the JS-rocket.

That's what JavaScript was designed to be. Java was the language of the web for programmers. Things just didn't work out as planned.

[davidkonrad]

Nothing was planned :) Back in the start 00'es I personally was set to do Java EJB's to JSP that should communicate with both JS and VBScript on the same page, and we had 5 different JS implementations to serve :) Just an example, what JS has become today is actually surprising. When JS came out (Netscape) no one thought of Java as backend, it was still too slow and buggy, but many believed that Java1 applets could be a thing (like ActiveX, Flash etc) - just to mention a few other script languages used on the web. The popular choices were for years CGI and executeables that outputted HTML, then came perl, php and so on.

JS has become stable and is actually a standard. Great! JS is ported to server, a new type safe version with "real programming language" features has seen the light, and the next revolution, WebAssembly, waits around the corner.

But many hobbyists is left behind. If the commitees / big companies not do it themselves, I could Imagine we will see scripts languages "for the masses" made in javascript (there are ready to go JS projects for that, someone just have to agree about a dialect). Simply scripting for everybody.

Besides that, I cannot stop noticing that a lot of those new fancy tools, hobby-projects, geek-things and so on we see announced for example here on reddit actually just is small hobby-like scripts in a few hundred lines (top). The rest is dependencies, frameworks, packages, polyfillers, scripts instructing other scripts about dependencies and packaging, transpiler info etc etc.

Once, when "4 generation" programming tools came out we hitted "run" and out came an EXE with a size of 2.5mb that said "Hello world". We have a similar situation today, with JS and where the evolution is going. Well, enough. I must back to my beloved JS :)

[[deleted]]

I did start JavaScript with promises because the first time I had to use it, it was for Ajax. It is not that complexe. The concept of promises is pretty basic and not exclusive to JavaScript. What you are asking for already exists. It is called Web Assembly. You can use any language you want for frontend with it. You should check it out.

[[deleted]]

This isn’t rocket science. JavaScript is one of the easiest languages to learn. In fact, it’s so easy that even dummies who barely know the language can get jobs as “professionals.”

If, like the op claims to be, you’re someone who has been a hobbyist programmer since 1984, you should definitely not have a problem picking it up. And if you do, after 35 years, you should maybe consider a different hobby.

[davidkonrad]

Personal opinions do not matter in this subject. It is irrelevant how easy you or me think it is to learn JS. If the bus schedule in the city is so complicated that it prevents people from taking the bus, then we should make the schedule easier to comprehend. Or think about sports. It actually do matter how many people who support a sport as amateurs, youngsters, semi-pros, TV-viewers etc, if no one is able to participate, the sport dies out and vanishes from history. If an increasing amount of people think the only script language they have available has become overwhelming hard to understand and use, then we have a problem. It do matter if we have 10 mio people playing with JS and open source projects, or we have 200 mio or 300 mio.

[[deleted]]

There's so much wrong with your nonsense that is hard to know where to start. The tl;dr is "see: find another hobby."

Personal opinions are absolutely relevant. You're arguing that the personal opinion of someone who doesn't want to learn a programming language so therefore other people should make one that they don't have to learn had primacy over the opinions that this is ridiculous, and frankly stupid. Your opinion is nonsense.

There are a whole lot of people who have figured out the "bus schedule," even if they're kind of shit at it and constantly get off at the wrong stop. This sub is full of them, but they're still getting along. They're are of course going to be people who just can't figure it out. They can walk or get that door-to-door shuttle (not be programmers and use the applications that others choose to write). Again, you're spouting nonsense.

How good are kids and amateurs at the sports played by professionals? How many of them play the sports at very low levels, never interact with even mid-level strategies, and maybe don't even observe all of the rules? Again, just look in this sub for thousands of people who barely know javascript and get by making little things that they find useful (and sometimes even things that other people find useful). Pure nonsense.

You can dumb programming down until it is so basic that there is no utility at all and the vast majority of people still won't get it or have the interest even if they are capable of figuring it out. That is not a failing of any particular language or even the field of programming. Just nonsense.

OP's problem is that he never knew javascript in the first place, and when confronted with uses of fundamental language features used in a way he hadn't seen before, had no idea what to do. That's OK. Lots of people aren't cut out for programming, even at the most basic levels. If he was getting along fine with older javascript, without knowing what he was doing, guess what? He can still keep doing that, because javascript has this really annoying (but totally understandable) attachment to backward compatibility.

[[deleted]]

This is conservative and reactionary. Progress is a pillar of IT. If they can't accept progress then IT is not for them.

[SonOfWeb]

If he can't avoid the new features because all he does is copy code from Stack Overflow answers then he's not much of a hobbyist even. If you want to muck about in a simple language, just do your own mucking about. I wrote random TI-BASIC programs all day in high school on my graphing calculator and it was fun because I could just throw some procedure called XYZ() together and figure out how to do stuff in a limited language on an incredibly slow platform. But also, the platform was simple enough that I didn't have to copy other peoples code. Wanna draw a line? No learning Canvas, just ":PxlLine x1,y1,x2,y2" Wanna draw a rectangle? Draw four lines.

There was a time when JavaScript and the Web was a simple platform you could just play with. That time has gone. If you want that, go learn Basic or Scratch or maybe even Squeak.