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Rob Ashton – “Javascript sucks and it doesn’t matter”



DevDay,
5th October 2012, Kraków

“Javascript has traditionally been the Marmite of the development world, people either love it or hate it and there is always that one person who did a bit of jQuery last year and is therefore ambivalent about the whole thing.

Why is it so divisive? What’s really so bad about the language? Do these things really get in the way of writing a good product or good software? What steps can we take to mitigate this and do we really need to worry about it so much?”

Original source

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29 responses to “Rob Ashton – “Javascript sucks and it doesn’t matter””

  2. Plenty of 'Straw man' arguments. Makes for good stand up but pretty divisive arguments. I would have liked to have seen a seasoned JavaScript professional to explain the concepts he was corrupting BECAUSE he obviously DOES have a sound knowledge of programing.

  4. JavaScript doesn't suck. I rather a good language with a clumsy syntax than a bad language with a good one.
    Rust and powershell and way better than C and bash.
    The worst language in the world is, you guessed it- PHP. And Facebook was built in it, because that's all Zuckerberg knew. He couldn't build his website on Python or Java. Once you start a project in a language, you're stuck for life. My friend even told me that he converted from Python from PHP because the devs are cheaper and easier to find. Most common doesn't mean the best. Are you gonna argue that CAT5e is better than CAT6
    P.S. yes, you unix weenies, I actually use powershell on mac and linux. That's how useful it is.

  12. "Is false, false or true, or 0 or a string or…" who cares? You should.
    Dude, learn the language before you shit all over it. Theres only like 6 things that coerce to false
    1.0
    2. NaN
    3. null
    4. undefined
    5. an empty string
    6. …false (surprise)

    Everything else is true. How hard is that?
    Its MUCH easier than memorizing the difference between Dictionary, List<T>, Queue, SortedList, Stack, Enumerable, Hashtable, Arraylist, Concurrentqueue, concurrentStack, Sorteddictionary, LinkedList, KeyedCollection, Stringdictionary, ListDictionary, IComparer, ICollection, IListShitter, IEnumerabletypedlistdictioinarysortableHastablearryIhateMylife

    I'm not saying having 50 abstractions to represent a list is bad. I'm saying if you can learn that, you can learn 6 ways something gets coerced. Much smaller set of things to understand.

  22. All the quirks you showed have a very persistent logic behind them, very few dig into understanding the real basics of the language. The real problem behind javascript is that there is too little good literature on the basics of it. Yes there are tons and tons of books, articles, daily js confs and stuff alike, but in the end of it there's very little of real understanding, very little percent of material is comprehensive, the majority of the material is like "oh if you don't use var some magic shit happens, DON DOO IT". For really grasping what's going on there under the hood and why you must use var or what happens if you really don't use it, how variable object is initialised and how this specific knowledge can help you understand what's really goin on : I can advice starting your javascript journey right from specification observers and evangelists like Dmitry Soshnikov (http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/), Yuriy Zaytsev (http://perfectionkills.com/), Angus Croll(https://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/), Ilya Kantor (http://javascript.info/). And you will see that quizes like this http://javascript-puzzlers.herokuapp.com/ will become at least to say, understandable. But it's not about quirks, in the real day to day work you don't ordinarily face 98% of all the quirks that the javascript is being blatantly blamed of, the other 2% are easily skipped with some framework and styleguide or just coding ethics. But think about how much agility the language gives, you cannot write Java javascript-ishly, but you can do the contrary with ease, so as other with other languages, think about how rapidly it grows and develops, but as we see the core functionality stays the same, mostly sugar appears on top of it, because javascript at its core is incredibly extensive and elegant. And it's elegance kills, on monthly basis, all evertrying and everspawning so-called javascript-killers like coffescript, atscript,typescript,godknowswhatelsescript and will continue dominating.

  24. Javascript is completely retarded, but it does wonderful, wonderful things, which is probably why we're all here defending it even though we've probably all spent hours pulling hair out over cryptic errors or even code with absolutely no errors not doing what it should.

  29. "i don't do semi-colons, that's stupid". wow, way to make yourself look like a jackass. semi-colons definitely help with readability/understanding for a presentation like this where some of the audience may be new to javascript

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