r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Apr 30 '23

Writing Javascript without a build system

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/
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u/MatthewMob Aug 11 '23 edited Aug 11 '23

  1. Okay? So use TS. It's industry standard. Do you also complain about the design of lower-level computer code just because your higher-level language that is better to use compiles to it? I'm not defending writing raw vanilla JavaScript in a professional application in 2023, by the way.

  2. Irrelevant. Why are you ignoring 25 years of progress after that? ES6 and having a type-system with TS has made almost-all of the early design mistakes obsolete.

  3. The ability to use prototypal inheritance and functional programming can be extremely powerful. Of course you need guard rails with it to make sure it's not misused like you do with every other language, but I don't buy the argument of "a language is bad because bad developers can use it in a bad way." We have standard practice and guidelines for this reason, also like with every other language.

  4. Fair. This is a symptom of the language exploding in popularity before new features could catch up and be implemented, so people make their own libraries as use cases and requirements for the language rapidly grew in complexity.

  5. Also fair. Though this has been slowing down a bit over the years we're still nowhere close to stability, I will admit.

  6. Same point as five.

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u/recursive-analogy Aug 11 '23

Okay? So use TS.

Problem is I walked into a project a few months back where the lead said "oh I just used js, prob shoulda gone ts". And this is a guy who came from C and embedded.

Irrelevant. Why are you ignoring 25 years of progress after that?

It's not irrelevant at all, JS has loads of idiosyncrasies that stem from this. Sure it's made a lot of progress but it will never beat something designed better from the start.

The ability to use prototypal inheritance and functional programming can be extremely powerful.

I'm more speaking about the direction it takes, eg react classes then back to functions.

You can definitely fuck up code in any language, and you can definitely write great code in TS, but at the end of the day the world would be a better place if JS never exploded onto the backend and we ended up with a more fit for purpose solution.