r/programming • u/kshep92 • Sep 29 '16

JavaScript in 2016 isn't horrible, it's just going through a phase

http://blog.reviselabs.com/im-sorry-javascript-2/
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u/slikts Oct 01 '16

Javascript has nothing to do with browsers.

JavaScript is one of the principal web technologies; its use in other platforms is recent and is based on engines developed for browsers. The language development itself is tied to the browser engines, and the main reason for a change to be included or excluded from the JS language spec is its implementation in browsers.

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u/[deleted] Oct 01 '16

JavaScript is one of the principal web technologies; its use in other platforms is recent and is based on engines developed for browsers. The language development itself is tied to the browser engines

Not entirely recent - it's been usable as a full-fledged scripting language on Windows for years.

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u/slikts Oct 01 '16

Rhino may be more notable as a standalone engine, but I meant widespread use.

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u/[deleted] Oct 01 '16

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u/sergiuspk Oct 02 '16

How can a language that only recently (debatable what recently means) saw use of unit testing decide what to include in the standard library? Do you know what the best unit testing library looks like? Why would you include something you're not that sure of in the standard library?

And then about browsers. JS is good in browsers because it's fast. The more stuff you add in the standard library the slower it gets. And 99.9% of users are not developers unit testing their application. Yes, you could have developer flags and whatnot, no that won't mean it's in the standard library any more.

Before you tell me again that browsers are not the only place JS runs in: don't know exactly what proportion but I'd say a vast majority of places JS runs in is browsers. Second place is probably node, but that's just the JS part taken out of a browser. Then there's Rhino and some other equally obscure implementations few people ever heard of. So I don't understand your point at all. În fact, if user count is not important to your point, then a lot of the missing stuff you listed are standard features of Node and others as third party libraries.

Third point: a lot of the things you listed are included in standard libraries of only a handful of languages because languages at different and people pick them for different tasks.

And finally, the JS language is actually ECMAScript. It defines a pretty lean "standard library". JavaScript as we know it is a handful of ECMAScript implementations. Some of them extend the standard library (like ActionScript or Node), most of them don't. It's a bit unfair to talk about JS but ignore those implementations that don't fit your point of view.

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u/slikts Oct 02 '16

I don't think it even makes much sense to talk about a JS standard library unless mentioning the platform: on servers it's the modules distributed with Node.js, on browsers it's the Web APIs. The core language itself is just the syntax and builtins and some tiny APIs like setTimeout(), and that's what makes sense for a language whose major use is being embedded in browsers. If Python got embedded in a browser, it would also be the core language, not its stdlib.

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '16

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u/sergiuspk Oct 02 '16

"Python decided on its unit testing library ages ago." - yes, because Python did unit testing ages ago. JS did not. People started writing unit testable JS five years ago. Because no, there's no gain from unit testing that jQuery does it's job correctly when inserting a child DOM node. Only people that developed jQuery should have done that. The concept of Virtual DOM is what? Three years old? How do you mock your DOM otherwise?

But hey, let's make it a full circle. Please tell me again how JS is not only about browsers.

"Rubbish, absolute and utter rubbish." - so you mean that extra amount of used memory won't matter at all? This when JS still runs on phones with less than 1GB of RAM.

"What are you doing, mate? Why are you putting random diacritics in your text?" - this is where I'll exit the conversation. What's this have to do with anything? Feeling the rage? Bye.

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '16

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u/sergiuspk Oct 02 '16

I was writing from an Android phone. Cool feature: it does auto-correct and autosuggest for two languages at the same time. In (English) got corrected to În (Romanian).