Comment by chuckadams
19 hours ago
I've a few opinions on the content, but I'm most interested in which unicode analyzer tool generated that nifty text tree diagram.
I can deal with JS's warts because the tooling is so much better. The other language I make my living with is PHP, and while it's much improved from before, the global function namespace is still a garbage fire, and you need extra linters like phpstan-safe-rule to force you to use sane wrappers.
For backend work, I'd recommend giving C# a look. Syntactically similar to TypeScript[0] but for any serious work, having runtime types and some of the facilities of .NET (e.g. Roslyn, expression trees, Entity Framework Core, threads, etc.) is really nice.
I recently moved from a C# backend startup to a TS backend startup and the lack of runtime types is a real friction point I feel every day with how the code has to be written (e.g. end up writing a lot of Zod; other projects have different and varying types of drudgery with regards to meta-typing for runtime)
[0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/
I'm thinking Kotlin for my next backend project. Or maybe Unison ;)
I prefer Java because I know it better, but Kotlin is nice. I'd prefer it over .NET, which is still kind of messy unless you're doing some quite specific things where the multi platform efforts have actually succeeded. F# is fine for small tools and some CLI stuff, but big frameworky things tend to be a mess or MICROS~1 specific.
Some people are likely to claim it's not the case anymore and so on, but it's my recent experience on Debian. The JVM environment has its warts and Maven sometimes feels like a huge dumb golem but at least it doesn't come across as whiny or make you feel like a second class citizen.
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Both JS and PHP are rather footgun-rich languages; have you tried Python, Java, Kotlin, or C#?
> have you tried Python, Java, Kotlin, or C#?
Yes, plenty of experience in the first two, but the last two are better contenders. At any rate I work primarily with TS when I do front-end code, it's very rare for me to write raw JS, so a lot of footguns automatically go away.