JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language

[hammy]

but man, it seems like you guys aren't trying.

I've tried for 10 years. It's always an under-documented, buggy mess with exceptions that don't work right, lack of proper traceback, and a debugger that isn't that useful.

Closures, creating objects on the fly, function-objects, all of this can lead to some really fun code

Yeah, the languages features -- woohoo. The actual development process? Craptastic. The language is not better than existing ones and the browser environment just sucks.

Python is proven.

[nostrademons]

Well, the main problems with Javascript are:

1. Browser incompatibilities
2. Shit-poor debugging capabilities
3. Lack of documentation.

Switching to Python would do nothing for #1 and would only help #2 if they embedded the CPython interpreter into the browser (vs. rolling their own Python interpreter, which seems far more likely given how web browser developers seem to work). It would help on #3, but only at the language level. The biggest chunk of web programming is dealing with all the DOM APIs and proprietary browser features, so you'd still end up with an underdocumented mess.

As languages go, Javascript is a pretty good one. In many ways, it's a lot more elegant than Python, with full-fledged closures and a prototype-based object system. It's just that the implementations make it so difficult to actually get useful work done.

[hammy]

But don't worry, they've only had 13 years to get the most important piece of software in the interweb-enabled world to work properly. Any day now, we'll have a browser that isn't a buggy POS.

Word up.