this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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I wish death upon it, but it just won't die. I guess that's cuz it's the only frontend. Or at least the only frontend that allows DOM manipulation.
That's exactly it. Every single webapp in the world has some level of javascript in it.
Noob question here. What's DOM manipulation?
Document ObjectModel. Think using code to add a JavaScript to make a drodown menu appear like for a navigation bar. That would be manipulation. And I think there's so much more Angular and React do with DOM that I don't know enough to explain it.
thanks to wasm any language is a browser running language. JS is relegated to some token binding boilerplate as part of any framework and with things like servo/tauri rendering html will be pure rust
Theoretically yes, practically you may have to deliver a whole runtime depending on the languagey making websites even bigger and slower to load initially. And unless it's a webapp with data processing on the client the perceived performance benefits may be negligible.
correct
good languages like rust have tiny bundles and initialize in microseconds, of course :)
It's because it's a great language. Legitimately cannot understand why anyone would dislike it, especially with the the ES5+ editions and the advent of Typescript.
I started with C#, and have used Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby in professional capacities and still find Typescript to be my favourite by a significant margin.
People dislike JS because it's packed full of moronic footguns and technical debt. The "standard library" is full of baffling decisions and, much like the language, rarely does what you expect. Even its creator agrees it's a terrible language and should have been replaced by now.
TypeScript is better, but at the end of the day it's just an illusion. Add an
anyanywhere, which will happen, and you're back to square one. It also still inherits some of the weirdness of JS, because it is just JS with fake types bolted on. Plus, the amount of work one has to do to create a proper library with TypeScript support completely undermines the few advantage of JavaScript. Might as well use a real statically typed language at that point, at least you'd be sure your types are actually enforced.Also, the whole web ecosystem is ass. The hoops one has to jump through nowadays to do web development are absolutely batshit crazy. And no, having a
create-whateverthat sets things up for you is not a real solution.I don't recall the experience being even equally pleasant in other languages, let alone better.
It definitely isn't in some circumstances.
Frankly I'd put C/C++ in a similar category when it comes to compilation.
Dealing with Make, CMake, linkage and all that can be a nightmare.
The ecosystem is a little bit better though in my opinion. If nothing else you get a proper standard library and don't have to rely on thousands of dependencies to get anything done... or you often roll your own if you are in C... which is meh.
I find Rust, C#, Go and anything slightly more modern to be a great or at least good experience.
Python as well if you use venv and your runtime and package versions align.
My point is, there is no perfect platform and ecosystem, but the web is generally regarded as one of the poorest.
I'm not saying someone can't enjoy working on web stuff, they most certainly can. But it is objectively overcomplicated.
I won't argue that the web is complicated, but a lot of that complexity comes from the necessity of supporting so many different environments that you can't control.
I'd also like to ask when the last time you used JS was-- we use one UI framework (Angular) but no lodash, jquery, etc. to provide library functionality. Everything's just built into JS now.
I can understand accounting for different environments. That's unfortunately unavoidable. But I found web framework developers in particular have a weird tendency of piling up ungodly amounts of abstractions just for the sake of it.
It's kind of a cultural problem in modern software development in general imo. It's not limited to web dev by any means, but it's particularly bad there because JS lends itself to it quite well.
I ❤️ abstraction. I'm an abstractionpilled layercel. I'm in my abstracting era.
Ah that's fine. There's nothing wrong with abstraction, until it becomes too much.
Day 43. My tech stack has breached the clouds. I can no longer see the ground. I fear that I will not be able to return to the surface.
You will not, indeed, it's going to be abstractions all the way down from now on
WittyResponseFactoryBuilder.setTone('lighthearted').build().createResponse().send()There's a distinct lack of
FactoryFactoryFactoryBuilders in this code snippet.Clearly you have yet to reach true abstraction nirvana.
Alas, I am but an instance, not yet a class
I had to go back to working with React just recently. I'm technically using TS, but the standard library is the same anyways. It hardly has everything imo.
It does have what it needs to interface with the browser, and quite a few -sometimes poorly thought out- facilities, but not much more.
Don't get me wrong, for a web scripting language it's plenty, but if one wants to use JS for stuff that isn't just putting a simple page on a screen, that's not enough.
Maybe you mean Node instead of JS?
What kind of standard library features are you looking for that don't exist?
Anything that isn't plain web browser stuff.
You can't write files without Node specific APIs.
You can't even do proper bitwise operations because everything's a float.
Binary serialization is a pain and proper deserialization in general is not enforced, even in TypeScript, because types are an illusion.
Up until recently there were no synchronization primitives, though now the idea of having them in JS seems terrifying.
There are no other data structures than arrays and maps, which are often not enough.
It's just not a language I'd use for anything more than... well... Scripting. But even though other, better solutions exist for cross platform development, people insist on using JS, so here we are.
You seem to be confused about what JS is. It's a high-level interpreted language. It's not C. Of course it can't open files. Can you imagine if any webpage could open files on your PC? This is like asking why Rust doesn't have a certain Blender shader node or Scratch block. The language fundamentally doesn't include those concepts directly. As an interpreted language, of course JS is going to access OS APIs through its host program. If the concern is that the APIs aren't standardized-- well, yeah, that's true. Although the basic stuff (file I/O) is included in runtimes directly.
Is there something I'm missing here? Why would you expect to be able to do bitwise operations on floats and get a sensible value? And if you want to do integer bitwise operations... you still can? Just use integer values and the bitwise operators? If you're complaining that you can't be sure if a number is an integer, that's 1. a separate issue, bitwise operations still work fine, and 2. easily solved.
Have you looked at the bit arrays JS has now?
Do you require multithreading for a language to be considered "good enough"? Why complain now that JS does have these abilities?
This is patently false. JS has sets, maps (actual ones, not objects like you were referring to), etc. We're soon getting records and tuples. If you want to build a linked list in JS, you do it the exact same way as you would in any other language. Not that it would be very useful.
No that's my point. You can't, because there's no such thing as an integer value. It's all floats, always. They get casted to integers, the binary operation is done, then they get converted back to floats. That's a lossy process, so some binary operations with certain values are simply not possible and you get weird results. The max width of an integer you can store is 53 bits, the maximum addressable width is 32 bits for binary operations. That's wonky.
Ah yes I forgot sets. But I don't think there's anything else? Last time I checked there were no binary trees, no proper (ring buffer) queues, no ordered sets, but I may be wrong on that. It's not enough imo for a proper standard library.
For everything else:
My point is that JS is an okay scripting language for the web. As I said, for that it's perfectly fine, though the frameworks are often lacking imo. But there is this tendency to use it to create backends, desktop applications and tooling. That's where the language falls apart, because it's not made for that. It needs to be more robust, well defined and fully featured to be used in those contexts, both in terms of JS itself, and its standard library. Same with TS.
I know and that's the point. It's underspecified for things outside the web, so it's terrible for those use-cases. You can make it work for Node, but not for Bun or any other runtime. And even then, the experience is acceptable at best.
I personally would never use it for such use-cases, but people keep touting it and TS as these amazing general purpose languages you can do anything in. You can, but you really shouldn't.
But you can. Any number that precisely represents a 32-bit integer can be used with binary operations as if it was one, and there will be no loss of information or unexpected results. Is it weird that JS has no integer type, or that its max safe integer representation caps out at 2^53? Yes, but that's not the complaint you made. Binary operations work literally perfectly as expected for any inputs that have the appropriate type. Actual float values are truncated, which fits the language design.
I'm sure you're aware of push, pop, shift, and unshift, which together can make a FIFO or FILO structure, or a more complicated one, from an array. If you're using TS you could create a semantic type that only allows a subset of these operations. I will concede that we have no tree type, although I'm not sure if that's standard in other languages? I haven't needed to use one myself.
Anyways, I won't fight you on JS being overused. I will say that it's flexible enough that it can be used in any way, even if it's not the greatest idea. Something like embedded programming or safety-related things shouldn't use JS. And as you keep mentioning, it wasn't made for low-level stuff, although it can do it. I don't think that's a requirement for a stdlib though.
C# with the M$ echosystem sucks ass though. It's like at first wow nice language, now how do you do this or that basic stuff and it's just crap.
I want a Map. map map; ? Oh no ; Map map=new(); ???
Where are the destructors?
Etc.
I get the feeling it's too steered by the corporate and not enough open source.
For all the hate PHP gets (or used to get) it's ecosystem is amazing. And so is the language and standard library itself for the most part. It still inherits some of the original issues, but a lot of work has been done to minimize them.
I think it probably could be, in Lisp. Like the one they used in early MIT computer labs (Scheme).
Many of the best ever known programmers came out of MIT computer labs, and for good reason.
Lisp on the web is a fascinating alt history scenario
Yes. And I want academics online like Matt Parker to discuss it with me.
Lol, no it's not. The literal only footgun is the truthiness aspect of equality and using ===, and it's really not hard to figure out and avoid. Especially given that linters will automatically flag it for you.
It is extremely easy to not let
anyslip into your code, you do this little thing called review code before merging. Crazy, I know, but by just following the most basic software development practices it turns out you can also avoid other basic junior mistakes! Wild right?And lmao, oh my god the web ecosystem is ass because a framework for producing robust complex applications isn't just an html and CSS file? Lmao bruh, tell me you've never coded in a different language without saying you've never coded in a different language. You think a .csproj or a .gradle file is simpler and more intuitive?
You're mistaking basic junior programming mistakes for issues with the language.
I've been a software developer for over 10 years, on both on the front end and the back end.
I've worked with jQuery, React, plain old DOM manipulation, god damn PHP. I'm not new to web development.
Outside of web technologies, I've worked on nautical charts processing software and microcontroller firmware in C, C++ and Rust.
I've worked on native GUI applications with C++, Java and C# using JavaFX, WPF, GTK, Qt.
All under strict corporate standards.
I also work on compilers and rendering engines in my spare time.
So no, I'm not a "junior programmer" making "basic junior programming mistakes". Your favourite language is ass.
You shouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that someone has never written a line of code only because they say so.
Sorry if it hurts your feelings, but even senior developers, web or otherwise, say it. I'm not the one swimming against the current, you are.
Alright, let's do a little experiment, shall we? Let's try and create an empty electron app with React and TypeScript.
A quick
create-electron-appand some configuring TS, ESLint and WebPack later we reach a whopping3_087_725lines of code. 3 million lines. ~700MB.This all requires a linting step, a pre-compilation step though
tsc, multiple additional translation steps throughwebpackfor older ES versions.All of that for an empty page on a webview.
This is batshit crazy. And I come from fucking CMake for crying out loud.
There is nothing robust about this, the slightest misstep and your sourcemaps are fucked.
Whoops the author of
left-paddecided to pull it from npm - half the JS ecosystem on its knees.Whoops the author of
is-evenone day decides it's a stupid package to need - half the JS ecosystem on its knees.Web developers are standing on a crumbling, fermenting pile of shit. Get over it.
...
With that said, you can still enjoy JS and all the web stuff, there's nothing wrong with that...
I worked for a company that refused to use TypeScript because it "slowed devs down". It was...a laughable period in my life.
Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.
typescript is a linter
While the rest of the world shifted left dudes went ahead and shifted right
As much as people like to make fun of JS/TS, I think you’re right, especially compared to the languages you mentioned. It’s my second-favorite language after Rust.
I think I would put Swift above it as well, except I don’t really use it since it’s too domain-specific in practice.
The newest iteration of the language might be okay, but the ecosystem is an absolute mess.
Working with npm projects is always a pain, everything changes all the time for no reason, and often enough in subtle ways you can't anticipate.
Plus, there's just an army of not very good and/or inexperienced developers vomiting their incompetence into the ecosystem.
Languages are not isolated. Java doesn't force abstractFactoryBuilders, yet hundreds of developers follow that pattern. So Java in practice is rather verbose.
The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript's standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.
Java basically does because it did not support functional programming forever forcing most of the base standard libraries to eschew those patterns (looking at you spring), and because even today it does not treat functional programming as first class and it is difficult to accomplish the same things with it then with other languages.
It is also missing many extremely common shorthand syntax expressions like optional chaining.
Not really, no. The over-abstraction Java is often doing is a question of mindset. Java devs tend to be very keen on reusability , which is fine, but often enough the result is unusable.
The problems behind abstractFactoryBuilders are not inherently unsolvable without these constructs, it's just that Java devs chose this rather weird approach.
I absolutely agree with you. If I can avoid NPM I will indeed do so. Sometimes that means using Deno, but sometimes it can be a valid reason to avoid using the language altogether. And sometimes we have to suck it up 🤷♂️
B-b-b-but you can't do that!!1! What if my customer wants to calculate
5+"three"*[]???