Comment by th0ma5

Comment by th0ma5 2 days ago

5 replies

In the context of the time it was created it was fine to mess with and having an enlightened view from the future can't negate that even though I understand the complaint.

shakna 2 days ago

JS has had how many breaking changes since then...? They've transitioned to the future.

Why is it still here today?

  • josephg a day ago

    > JS has had how many breaking changes since then...?

    What breaking changes has JS ever had? Its an incredibly stable language.

    • shakna a day ago

      Ok, lets reword that. JS has breaking changes in browsers or node at least once a year.

      If the platform can continuously shift, in an ecosystem that rots faster than my veggie garden, can we not have more sensible systems in place?

      • josephg a day ago

        You’ve still failed to give any examples of these breaking changes. Old websites still work great.

        I’ll try again. What breaking changes does JavaScript make? What are you talking about?

        • shakna 16 hours ago

          8 months ago, Chrome rewrote how URLs work [0]. Which, unsurprisingly, affects the `URL` constructor in JS.

          We have had so many APIs vanish from any context to "secure contexts" only. Like AppCache, or workers, or the clipboard.

          Entire APIs like XMLHttpRequestProgressEvent have vanished entirely.

          In fact, there is a lot of obsolete features. Enough that there's a list. [1] You can't use global or source with a RegExp anymore. You can't use the arity property on a function anymore. `Object.prototype.eval` is dead. `Object.getNotifier` is dead. `Date.prototype.toLocaleFormat()` is dead.

          Old websites have been broken. Repeatedly. Or we wouldn't have, say, blogspam on why mixed content suddenly broke some Wordpress systems.

          Yes, these are good changes. They're more secure. However, we're willing to break some sites in the name of security, but unwilling to fix ambiguous parsing for the programmer?

          [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912354

          [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...