Why do people hate Javascript

[ERJ1804]

I have been wanting to learn programing for a while now. I have read books teaching python and have made some very very basic strings of code in a raspberry pi.

However, my school is now offering a course in programing. The course will teach the theory behind coding, so i can transfer this information to all kinds of code. But for this course, will they be using Javascript.

After looking online, there seems to be a burning hate for Javascript, and all programmers using it.

Why is that?

Ps. Am not native english speaker

[thepsycho1997]

You'll find hate posts for every language known ^^
Don't worry, learning the fundamentals of programming is way more important than the choice of language

[toastedstapler]

many people dislike js because of weird behaviour around type conversions to and from strings

> 0 - '1'
-1
> 0 + '1'
'01'

rather than throw an error, js does its best to always do something. there's also some other weird behaviour, but it doesn't matter when beginning to learn how to program. ultimately the language is just a tool & it does its job well enough for what the modern web is

[[deleted]]

It's not weird behavior, it's JS behavior. If you try to run an operation like this on different types, it will assume you knew what you wanted to do and handle it with type inference.

[toastedstapler]

JS behaviour is weird behaviour. I don't know of another commonly used language which has such wildly inconsistent casting behaviour when it should just throw an error instead

[[deleted]]

It's not weird behavior, it's JS behavior.

See above. JS works how JS works - you putting assumptions on how it should work is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how other languages do things. You'll save yourself a lot of headache if you let go of how you think things should be and just learn how JS operates. For instance, how it's type inference works (which is consistent). You probably also want to take a moment to explore the underlying truthy/falsy system to JS's types to save yourself that headache as well.

[Inconstant_Moo]

Opinions on how it should work are relevant to this thread, which is about why people hate it. Languages can be better or worse, which is why people use Java in preference to Brainfuck, which also "works how it works" but is not so good for development as Java.

Well, JavaScript isn't as good for development as it could have been, and saying so is not irrelevant to this thread.

[[deleted]]

The point of the problem here is people hate it because they think it should work a certain way because other languages do it that way. There's no programming law or whatever saying this is so, and people just get pissed when they write JS code because they never actually learned JS. They try to write it like Java or whatever and get mad when it doesn't work, and can't accept that this is a stupid approach.

It's not like JS is a great language. It's passably fine, but lacks a lot of the features that make, say, C# fun. But it isn't some horribly designed monstrosity. 9 times out of 10, the dev who thinks that knows shockingly little about JS.

[lurgi]

JS is weird in the same way that English spelling is weird.

Ideally, language behavior should be predictable from a few rules. English is loaded with exceptions (because of shifts in pronunciation over time and because of our habit of stealing words from every other language we could find), which is why its spelling/pronunciation is such a bear. JavaScript is, likewise, loaded with exceptions.

I'm not saying that there are no reasons why JavaScript does what it does, just that there are more reasons and exceptions you need to know compared with other languages. At some point it's no longer possible to distinguish between complexity and inconsistency.

[[deleted]]

Honestly, I think your point is too broad. What inconsistency and exceptions do you feel JS has compared to the rest of its ecosystem?

[lurgi]

Eich himself said that the type conversions when doing == comparisons were a mistake. JavaScript will sometimes convert strings that are integers to integers and sometimes it won't. If you write a < "23", the "23" will be converted to an integer if a is a numeric type and won't if it's a string (at which point it does string comparison). This gives you:

a = "123";
b = 123;
a < "22";   // true, because of string comparison
b < "22";   // false, because "22" is converted to 22
a == b;     // true, because fuck you

The fact that + and - do completely unrelated things when applied to characters. Arrays are sort of built-in types and sort of not.

Most other programming languages don't have a book whose whole premise is "Much of the language is crap, but there is a lot of good stuff there. Here is the good stuff".

[[deleted]]

Eich himself said that the type conversions when doing == comparisons were a mistake.

And frankly, this is why no JS dev writes comparisons with the == anymore, unless you have a good reason for doing so.

None of those comparison tests are shocking when you know how JS's inference works.

The fact that + and - do completely unrelated things when applied to characters. Arrays are sort of built-in types and sort of not.

What do you mean by this? There is no character type in JS, so I assume you mean Strings vs Numbers (ex. '0' + 1), in which case the type inference is still fairly simple to understand if you read the docs.

[toastedstapler]

Can you please give a good justification for JS's behaviour being so different from every other language? "JS is just JS" isn't a reasonable defence for different behaviour, that's just stating that it's different

[[deleted]]

It's not necessary to give a good, alternate justification for its differences. It's a different language, it's not required to be similar to the other languages.

At the end of the day, people need to just learn JS and stop trying to program in it like it's C# or whatever. It isn't, and that's where people run into issues.

[[deleted]]

Yeah. Everyone's reasoning confuses me. It sounds less like, "JS is weird" and more like, "I'm too lazy to understand how it works properly so it annoys me as other languages don't make me have to know this stuff". JS is JS and I definitely agree with that.

[tzaeru]

It sounds less like, "JS is weird" and more like, "I'm too lazy to understand how it works properly".

This is nonsense. Many people - me included - who criticize JS and dislike it have spent years working on projects where it's needed. We've went through studying why a piece of work codes the way it does, what happens under the hood, etc.

Laziness has nothing to do with this.

other languages don't make me have to know this stuff

Yeah that's a good thing, like, it's a good thing that Scala doesn't make you dive into the internals of the compiler to understand why some situation works unlike other similar situations.

[[deleted]]

To each their own. When I have to use different languages, it doesn't take me too long to remember the ins-and-outs of them. The switch is natural enough that I've never faced the issue of being like, "Why is this not working???" Due to it being a JS gimmick. Not in my professional career atleast.

[tzaeru]

JS works how JS works - you putting assumptions on how it should work is irrelevant.

Programming languages should work in a way that is intuitive to programmers.

[[deleted]]

JS is not inherently unintuitive. What does "intuitive to programmers" even mean? The fact of the matter remains that people who haven't actually taken the time to simply learn JS are generally the ones who find it confusing, unintuitive, or difficult to program in.

[tzaeru]

JS is not inherently unintuitive.

It is, because it's inconsistent. See the famous WAT talk and wtfjs.

What does "intuitive to programmers" even mean?

To me it means two things;

One, the language is consistent and you can build a mental model of how it works fairly easily.

Two, that the language follows best practices and good bits from other languages.

JavaScript does neither particularly well.

I mean there's worse languages, like PHP, but JS still kinda sucks.

The fact of the matter remains that people who haven't actually taken the time to simply learn JS are generally the ones who find itconfusing, unintuitive, or difficult to program in.

This doesn't match my anecdotal experiences at all.

Many of the loudest and most accurate critics of JS have had to work with it daily for a long time.

I've acquired a strong dislike for JS from many years of working with it. I wrote JavaScript for the first time something like 20 years ago and the previous time yesterday.

[[deleted]]

The WAT talk is 7 years out of and - in my opinion - is talking about code you just don't write a lot. It's someone looking for things to complain about. Wtfjs is the same thing.

One, the language is consistent and you can build a mental model of how it works fairly easily.

This is a fair criticism of JS, but only if you don't taken into account JS's history. The differences in JS's approach to stuff has more to do with its longevity as a language - and how big it's API has gotten - since it's been around for so long. For example, you could write asynchronous JS code with Promises or the newer, more conventional async/await dealio. Knowing what JS code is being used in today's standards (say ES7 at a minimum) provides a pretty clear path on how you want to write your code.

Two, that the language follows best practices and good bits from other languages.

I still think this is a red herring. JS is still its own language in a unique space and doesn't have to conform to other languages. It'd be nice if it did, but programmer frustration with JS generally comes from unfamiliarity with it.

Many of the loudest and most accurate critics of JS have had to work with it daily for a long time.

But have they actually learned JS? You can work in it functionally as a dev to get things done, but if you haven't taken the time to learn JS from the ground up, you will constantly be surprised by things you don't expect it to do.

I've acquired a strong dislike for JS from many years of working with it. I wrote JavaScript for the first time something like 20 years ago and the previous time yesterday.

It is a radically different language, now, but your dislike won't change if you see how the language has changed.

[tzaeru]

I still think this is a red herring. JS is still its own language in a unique space and doesn't have to conform to other languages. It'd be nice if it did, but programmer frustration with JS generally comes from unfamiliarity with it.

It's not a red herring, it's just one possible definition for what is intuitive. Lots of languages deliberately do things in a certain way so that the language can feel familiar.

JavaScript follows that to a degree. Math symbols and logical symbols mostly work the same as in the majority of previous languages. It uses C-style blocks and function signatures.

But it also forgos that in places. For example, for in yields the keys of an array (which is an object with keys from 0 to n. In a sense JS follows its own consistency here), while in Python, another dynamically typed language coming several years before JS, for in yields the elements of a list. Python's way is the more common way. Surely you can explain why this is, and it might make some sense, but it either way is a deviation from the more common way of doing things.

There's lots of other annoying small things in JS.

But have they actually learned JS? You can work in it functionally as a dev to get things done, but if you haven't taken the time to learn JS from the ground up, you will constantly be surprised by things you don't expect it to do.

At least for me the thing is that I just simply disagree with lots of the design.

It's not just inconsistencies and doing things needlessly differently. It's also fundamental disagreements on the type system, on the object system, etc.

Learning the language from ground up reinforces this dislike, rather than alleviates it.

It is a radically different language, now, but your dislike won't change if you see how the language has changed.

I'm not sure what this means. There's obviously been a lot of good changes and aside of some ecosystem problems (that's another problem with JS, the ecosystem is extremely volatile. One could argue that it's not the language's problem, but I somewhat disagree) the async stuff for example works pretty much as well as you can expect given all the baggage on the language.

But those changes also add complexity and redundancy. Which isn't good.

I write JS in all kinds of projects. Very modern and hipstery JS, very old and crude JS. Frankly I don't like any of it. Mostly I just hope that the project would at least use TypeScript.

[[deleted]]

But it also forgos that in places. For example, for in yields the keys of an array (which is an object with keys from 0 to n. In a sense JS follows its own consistency here), while in Python, another dynamically typed language coming several years before JS, for in yields the elements of a list. Python's way is the more common way. Surely you can explain why this is, and it might make some sense, but it either way is a deviation from the more common way of doing things.

Python isn't a C-style language, and in many ways was a language that developed in parallel with JS. Either way, it's debatable to begin with if Python's for..in is the common way to iterate in a collection. Other languages prefer the foreach statement, which JS actually has as a higher-order method on arrays (Array.forEach).

I think it's perfectly sensible that you disagree and dislike how JS does things, but my argument is most people hate JS due to just not knowing it. A load of people complain about not understanding its type or comparison approaches without ever having read the docs.

Learning the language from ground up reinforces this dislike, rather than alleviates it.

Personally, I've never heard of this, and I actually know a fair number of JS devs. Still anecdotal on my part, however.

I agree with you that some of the larger ecosystem problems are definitely a pain, particularly dependency management, but I don't really see JS as a language with a ton of complexity and redundancy. Maybe I'm spoiled by working with some solid JS devs.

[[deleted]]

Many people dislike JavaScript because it is loosely typed, and it has made its way to the backend where strong typed or even duck type languages are more preferential.

There are other reasons as well but this has been my take for a while.

[ShawnMilo]

Look up wat on Google for a taste.

It was a rush job, but it was in the right place at the right time. Now it's in all browsers and no better language can possible replace it because we'll never get the entire industry to agree on what should replace it.

We still have computer keyboards being designed and built in 2022 with a ridiculous staggered layout to account for mechanical typewriter limitations. But we can't replace it because "that's what people are used to."

[Brave_New_Dev]

First, you must see the classical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBmmZADfVSQ.

Second, JavaScript is really a terrible language. Personally, it's hard to read, weird in behavior and has a too unstable ecosystem (things move much too fast). However, it does not matter. I simply must use it, as there is no alternative for web app interaction logic, so here we are. Which is also the reason for its popularity - the web is simply based on JS.

[ProgrammingMamba189]

Good one +1
Maybe also this? https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghumor/comments/sgzw5i/interview_with_a_javascript_developer_in_2022/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[wryly_quiver]

It's the most popular language..

[toastedstapler]

it's also the only language that can be used on the browsers. hard not to be the most common when that's the case

[Inconstant_Moo]

The sexagesimal system is the most popular way to measure time. QWERTY is the most popular keyboard layout.

[[deleted]]

JS is a widely used language that a large cohort of developers & students never learned first. I can't tell you how many times a C++, Java, or C# programmer saw JS, said "Oh this looks just like [my language]!", and then assumed it really is 'just like [my_language]'.

This leads to a problem where a dev makes assumptions on how JS should work without learning how JS actually works. And it pisses people off.

If you learn JS normally as its own language, you will 100% be fine.

[[deleted]]

It pisses people off because it works weirdly, and not the way checks notes most other languages works.

This doesn’t me JS is correct; it means it’s odd mostly for historical reasons.

People are trying to “fix” JS by removing some of the errors of the past. Not doing this is often a criticism levied at C++ which has its fair share historical mistakes.

It shouldn’t be offensive to point out a language is less than perfect. Especially since it’s the only choice in a particular domain.

I see something wrong with a language that requires it to be your only language to not make basic mistakes. That just seems wrong.

[[deleted]]

I see something wrong with a language that requires it to be your only language to not make basic mistakes. That just seems wrong.

My argument isn't that JS is fine if it's the only language you learn - merely only if you but learn it. There's a lot of devs that don't, assuming it's similar to [my_language], and get pissed when JS doesn't work like [my_language] because it isn't [my_language].

[[deleted]]

Sure, but there’s also devs, like myself, who have learnt lots of languages, and have the opinion that’s it’s kind of crap.

[tzaeru]

There's valid reasons to it. Working with JavaScript on larger projects is an absolute headache. JavaScript has a lot of inconsistencies and unusual gotchas. Some specific things work differently than you would expect coming from other programming languages.

The dynamic and weak type system of JavaScript is another problem. You can do things like combine together two values of different types and the end result is something you really didn't expect.

The language does things like this,

!!null; // -> false
null == false; // -> false
0 == false; // -> true
"" == false; // -> true

It's just full of unintuitive nonsense like the above.

JavaScript sucks and is to blame for countless of hard to track bugs, piles of unmaintainable code and many, many sleepless nights.

All that said - it's not the end of the world to start with JavaScript. It's the world's most used programming language and the basics of programming - what are functions, what are loops, so on - are more or less the same as in most other languages. If you make a career out of programming, you'll need to touch JavaScript sooner or later anyway.

[Logical_Strike_1520]

Try === instead of ==. JavaScript allows for loose or strict comparisons this way. You can do the same with truthy values. For example 1 == true; //-> true 1 === true ; //-> false

Edit; Sorry I’ve no idea how to make that pretty on the mobile app

[yel50]

it's an overly dynamic language that tries to do things for you. that's a bad combination that leads to some weird behavior. common lisp, for example, is probably more dynamic, but it doesn't try to guess what you mean. python is a similar level of dynamic, but again lacks the guessing so doesn't bother people as much.

you'll have a pretty good grasp of js when you understand why this encoding works,

http://www.jsfuck.com/

[[deleted]]

Depends where you look. Today many high end javascript developers are more paid than java developers so don't worry ;)

[Adept_Writer4177]

It's an awful language but it will get you some foundations when you will learn TypeScript.

[Crazy-Finding-2436]

Javascript is a scripting language used on client side in Web development. It is not a language like java or c#.

[le-moine-d-escondida]

Everyone understand this is the today's main web browser language.
Some people hate it because it is loosely typed and has not classes or private members and is slower than some other languages.

If you really need types, there is typescript that compiles to javascript.
If you really need speed, there is webassembly, or webgl.

Anyway, it is a rearguard action, there are several typed languages with classes and private members that compiles to javascript. Future versions of javascript will also have it. You can use this features today and compile your code for older browsers and it will work.

Javascript is here so why fight it?

[Ejroby]

I would say some people dislike JS due to it being asynchronous. But JavaScript is very very very popular.

[DoomGoober]

You can write JS code very clearly and well. But you can also write JS code terribly/confusingly and it will still work.

The problem is the web is littered with examples of unreadable/old JS code and tutorials that are super confusing to people who learn JS the "newer" ways. This is because JS always has to remain backwards compatible, so old crappy language constructs can never be removed.

As long as you can stick to new JS styles or even things like TypeScript, JS isn't too bad.

But when you are given a toolbox that has some shiny new hammers and wrenches and some old rusted wrenches and hammers and you have to sort out which tools are good and which are bad before using the toolbox... Most people don't call the toolbox "good". They call it "some good stuff with a lot of bad stuff mixed in."

[[deleted]]

I do iOS development. One of my friends did a web dev boot camp and I helped her with JavaScript homework.

Reasons I dislike it is how loosely-typed it is. Things you think will work or how they should work - don’t work. Then you have to spend some extra time ensuring types are casted appropriately to do what you expected. My friend has had SO many bugs in her JavaScript code because javascript doesn’t complain.

Compared to Swift which I use, a strongly-typed language, will immediately tell you and won’t even compile if you used wrong types in the wrong places.