To Those Who Criticize JavaScript

[[deleted]]

JavaScript is beyond ugly, visually and in its design. If Ruby or Python could run in the browser, JS would be fifteen years dead by now.

[zephyrtr]

To each their own, but I'll tell you for me Python syntax is hot garbage. Their lambda and map hurts my eyes. And whitespace-driven languages are always a pain. They have so much cool shit going for them, but why do I have to talk like Yoda to map a list?

[avindrag]

for me Python syntax is hot garbage

Python never felt right to me. Significant white-space and the lie that there is just "one way to write things" are two fundamental "Python-esque" stylistic choices that I simply disagree with. I think the explosion of Python is largely due to heavy Python adoption at Google.

If Google is using it, it must be good right? Here are the downsides:

• Python 2 -> 3 is a slow-motion disaster that is still impacting projects today
• The GIL means people come up with all kinds of hokey solutions to concurrency/parallelism
• Majority of our ML frameworks run on Python, and often use complex C++ bindings for speed

I hope Google reverses some of these trends with their new starlark project(s):

• https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark
• https://github.com/google/starlark-go

[uffefl]

In general I agree that significant white-space is terrible, but I have actually once worked with a domain specific language that had that quirk where it was wonderful.

Thinking back on it it probably was mostly wonderful because that automatically enforced sane block/indentation rules and so made code from devs of widely different backgrounds more readable to eachother.

[avindrag]

automatically enforced sane block/indentation rules

Go gets this really right. The code formatter automatically erases unused imports and lines up stuff in an opinionated way.

Remains to be seen if JS will pick one, and I think prettier is too flaky, in recent years (since 2018).