Comment by leptons
1 year ago
The only people saying "WTF" about Javascript are people who haven't taken the time to learn how to use it effectively. There are "WTF" things about every language, not just Javascript.
Noobs are going to find the footguns in any language. Every language can be misused. I've been using Javascript over 20 years and have never thought it was any worse than any other language. Yes, it's dynamic, and yes, you can do stupid things with that dynamism, but for someone who actually knows how to use it, it's quite easy to work with.
I recently started using Lua and I'm not impressed at all. It's just another language, it's really up to the programmer what can be done with it, just like Javascript.
This is the common arguement used by people defending languages with tons of footguns.
If this is true, why not write everything in C++?
Javscript includes so many footguns that people know are bad (see the billion of examples of different types being added and getting random answers). Every langauge has some difficult parts, pretending that means any amount is fine is crazy. Javascript has earned its reputation.
>(see the billion of examples of different types being added and getting random answers)
Almost every "footgun" people cite about Javascript is something that would never be written as working code, by any competent programmer - they are "WTF" in that the person writing the "gotcha" has to go way outside of normal programming behavior to get the "WTF" result. Most of these "WTF" examples should be taken with a grain of salt.
If you're expecting to "WTF" about Javascript's type inference/coercion, that works according to some logical rules.
https://media.geeksforgeeks.org/wp-content/uploads/advanced-...
This matrix should be pretty easy to understand. Yes some things might seem weird like [[]] == false, and [1] == true, but nobody should be writing code like that, it's just illogical to do anything this way and I don't consider it to be a "gotcha". "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" can be said about footguns in every language.
Yes, there are "WTF"s, but just like if I were to write a C++ "WTF", it wouldn't be something that most people would be tripped up by unless they were specifically looking for a way to say "WTF" about the language.
These "javascript sucks" internet arguments have persisted for decades, and it's always complaints about the language that are citing unreasonable examples to prove a point that a programming language has some rough edges. Every programming language has some rough edges.
Javascript maybe has more footguns than some other languages because it is so dynamic, and the dynamism has its benefits too that other languages don't have. I do like it and I use it effectively, YMMV. People just seem to be specifically mad at Javascript because it's so popular and was made so by being the defacto standard for web browsers. It's part jealousy and part frustration that their favorite programming language isn't the one that web browsers include by default.
This sounds like you haven't dealt with much moderately complex code in JavaScript. It sounds like you've never run into a situation where innocuous-looking code like
behaves strangely and it takes you hours to track down in debugging, only to find that somewhere else in the code, isAuthenticated was assigned an array and it was assumed it could be treated as a Boolean that would be false if and only if the array was empty. Turns out sometimes the value is [[]] and it gets treated as false unexpectedly.
In any reasonable language, even a dynamically typed one, this should just be a type error because it's not a Boolean, but JavaScript decides to do something almost certainly unwanted. This is the real source of the complaints, not the fact that you can write “[[]]==false” on the console and laugh at the results.
1 reply →
Agreed. I think a lot of the "classic" footguns are picked up by current-day linters/AI/code-assists anyway, so even if you do somehow end up writing [[]]==false legitimately (explicitly or implicitly), you'll probably get a squiggly warning about it on your IDE immediately warning you.
For better or worse, JavaScript is the Lingua Franca of modern programming - you have a high-performance runtime environment pre-installed on basically anything, and readily installed on greybeard boxen if you are that way inclined . It is my "go to" for all hobby projects, frontend and backend. So versatile and a genuine joy to code in.
Lua feels and acts like a worse javascript. Yes the runtime can make the memory footprint really small, but manipulation and validation of the crappy list/table structures makes the implementations miserably large. I've only written about a million lines of it (literally), so I'm pretty set in my opinion.
Python is also dynamic, but it doesn't let you do things like (1 + "a"), for example.
Okey, so the first thing everyone should learn is not to use "==" but use "===". Or, perhaps, just use TypeScript, right? I think that's what people call "effective JavaScript" these days.
Quite a lot can be built reliably with Javascript following only "use ===". YMMV. Typescript doesn't solve much unless you use it religiously (and few people really do), it still allows for all kinds of "gotchas" if you want to write "gotchas" with it.