I don't think so. He's not saying JS sucks; he's saying there are problems with an ever-shifting ecosystem (which he says is not totally unique to JavaScript).
I've met several programming curmudgeons in my time, none of them were JS devs. Oddly they were people like yourself that like to throw around lazy generalizations.
A programming language is not supposed to match human intuitions. We are trying to take things from the physical world an represent them in the digital world.
A programming language should be modelled on physical life.
But we still haven't figured this out yet.
I don't think many people understand what a poor language is, you really need to understand the spec fully and experiment with every paradigm in production to claim that JS is a poor language. Can you genuinely say that you have?
It’s funny but a lot of JS haters are Java devs. Which also don’t know a thing about JS, or at least think JS looks like in the 90s, with callback hells and whatnot.
JS has more than its share of problems, but I wouldn't consider that to be one of them. It's the same reference semantics as Java and Python, and people are used to it.
Uh, my whole point is that JS isn't that hard to learn, so why invest so much time trying to make it look like Java and write worse code in the process?
Thanks for helping my argument, I'm glad we agree that you're a bad engineer.
I don't really think JS is bad. I actually prefer it to most languages.
It's fast, concise, flexible, and has lots of modern features. It has some weak spots, but all languages do. When people are so ideological about the language it tells me they either haven't used it much or they are unrealistic about flaws in other languages.
I'd love if JS would receive a rewrite. But when you get down to it, JS isn't so horrible as you put it. In fact it is a very elegant language burdened by its initial design constrictions (i.e. forced to look like Java, tight time budget). So I don't understand all the hate.
JavaScript, the core language, is OK. Sure, there are warts, like this, lack of a good module system, and weird type coercions.
Most of the bad rap JavaScript gets is because it lives in the browser, and the DOM, with all the cross browser issues that come with that. It's not all JavaScript's fault. In fact, most of it is definitely not JavaScript's fault.
JS is a terrible language that nonetheless has wound up being everywhere. But despite its shortcomings as a language it is extremely flexible in what you can do (abuse) it with and that is probably its biggest advantage.
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