Comment by pluc
Comment by pluc 2 days ago
Please don't make fun of JavaScript. Last time it happened, it replied with Node and now it's everywhere.
Comment by pluc 2 days ago
Please don't make fun of JavaScript. Last time it happened, it replied with Node and now it's everywhere.
People may forget what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. It's been years since I've used TS, but I remember it failing to solve about half the problems that I had with JS. I think they did the best they could given the constraints though.
This article is a good example. TS can't fix the underlying APIs, standard library etc.
I wouldn’t blame TS for not fixing the JS standard library. It’s just a type system.
As of the last couple years, you're probably not wrong. Basically every open role right now requires TypeScript, Node, Next.JS, etc.
Meh, I used to have that feeling, especially when discovering fp-ts and then effect (neither of which I've been paid to write), but after about four years, I'm tired of writing it period. The standard library for node is horrible; the ecosystem is okay but not great. And I don't even care for effect anymore. I also write go in my job and it's just okay, but the standard library is much better.
I've been playing around with rust in my free time and like it. I think it's a good FP middle ground. Gleam also looks interesting. But to your point I imagine there aren't many jobs paying for rust and practically none for Gleam.
I believe Fly.io deploys some Gleam in prod. I tried playing with Gleam for a bit, but I got stuck trying to make the Actor Model make sense. It’s Gleam’s solution to mutable state, inherited from Erlang and the BEAM. It takes so much code just to emulate a simple, mutable Map. I liked Rust’s middle ground with `mut` in function defs.
I’m personally strongly opposed to using any library that becomes a new primitive of my project. I’m fine with an intrusive framework, but never a fundamental change to how plain-old business logic is written. That means fp-ts is out. However stuff like JS’s Date can be replaced under these rules - these days perhaps with a Temporal polyfill.
If you like one, you’ll prolly like the other
Hell you might even like ActionScript ;P
C# is nominally typed, which, in practice, leads to safer code and less type gymnastics. Of course you can avoid the type gymnastics with "any", then you you're sacrificing safety.
If you like TypeScript and C#, then you'll probably also like Delphi and Turbo Pascal!
They were all written by the same guy, Anders Hejlsberg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681
"My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg
"It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg
Agree. While people argue and split hairs over X language is better than Y language (noobs if I’m being honest, even if they have 20 yr experience), one can ship actual products and make money using TS.
It’s a good language that scales quite well to the point where you can then extract specific parts to more performant languages.
99.9% of people won’t have that problem, so I think they should just use TS and solve problems.
Anyone else can be safely ignored and they can complain in the corner.
I'd love to disagree, but every other language's ergonomics just seem so clunky or too magic, whereas with TS and the standard web APIs you have so much room to code how you see fit. Sure, I'd rather a LISP for purity but I'm a realist. If only Brandon Eich had really gotten his way, we'd have Scheme.
Reminding me of the near decade of WAT snark where people thought undefined behaviour was a complete proof of the futility of technology when it was actually just people mistaking what technology is. Like it isn't funny that you can't carry water with a brick but for some reason everyone thought JavaScript should be able to accommodate every possible fuckup with a specific error or just fix it. A nice goal but not something to then feel smug about when it doesn't happen but it seemed to be a viral perspective that persisted for way too long.
People aren't mad that errors aren't fixed automatically, people are mad that the behavior is inconsistent and weird for no fundamental reason other than "that's how the interpreter worked when it all started and it's too late to fix the spec now".
Python is a dynamic language as well and in many ways worse than JS, but
[] + {}
In JS
[] + {}
{} + []
First, [] + {} isn't an object, it's a string.
Second, {} + [] isn't a type conversion issue, it's a parsing issue. That {} isn't an object, it's a code block. Assign {} to a variable to ensure it's an object, then do var + [] and you get the same result as the first one.
When using an actual object in both of these, the type conversion makes sense: "+" acts on primitives like strings and numbers, so it has to convert them first. You're getting obj.toString() + array.toString() in either case.
I'll admit the parsing issue here is odd, but most of the time peoples' complaints about javascript type coercion is that they simply never bothered to learn how it works.
> peoples' complaints about javascript type coercion is that they simply never bothered to learn how it works
soo.... if the pesky people keep complaining, maybe it really doesn't make any sense? i for the life of me could never figure out why a bunch of mainstream languages a couple of decades ago decided that typing is no longer necessary and should be abolished. Is there any benefit of removing type checking (and relying on bizarre implicit coercion rules when ambiguity ensues)?
> the near decade of WAT snark
For today's lucky 10,000:
This guy single handedly caused a wave of unproductive cynicism with this stunt. It's like the joke about all the things an everything bagel doesn't have except essentially shitting on the hard work of the entire industry by making up endless nitpicks for laughs.
`Date` is based on the original Java `Date` class and its API was mostly copied verbatim, explaining a lot of the quirks and silliness. While JS can't remove things easily because that would break the web, a lot of work has gone into a set of time primitives that will effectively replace it. `Date`'s parsing logic is so bad even Java has deprecated it.
This is one of those cases where the problem isn't language design but boardroom politics - Sun wanted JS not to compete with Java so they had to try to make JS more like Java to present JS as a kind of "Java for amateurs".
I maintain that TypeScript is probably the best language you’ll be able to get paid to write.