I worked in heavy JavaScript codebases back in the IE days and wasn’t too crazy about it. Then JIT compilers like v8 came along and made it run a lot faster and TypeScript also made it more usable for larger codebases. I now consider TypeScript among my favorite languages. I’ve also written a lot of Go lately, and while I appreciate its speed and smaller memory footprint, the missing language features kind of grate on me and I don’t mind taking a bit of a performance hit for the (IMO) superior ergonomics of TypeScript, especially for workloads where I/O is more of the bottleneck than compute.
agreed. typescript is excelent, especially if you make it strict and know a bit of complex types to make sure things stay put.
Chiming in as a professional TS dev. It’s really a joy to do web dev work in the post TS world.
What do you think of JSDoc? As someone who knows neither I find the idea of no required transpilation very appealing, while still getting the TS ecosystem tools.
JSDoc is much more cumbersome than using TypeScript. That’s it. It clutters the code in a way that TypeScript somehow avoids. TS types are smoothly integrated in the code itself, IMO. Not as much the case with JSDoc.
Thanks! As a hardware guy it’ll be a long time before I do anything with this information. Nice to hear the opinions of actual Devs.
I suspect most Lemmy users hating on JS haven’t done much professional JS work. Especially these days with TypeScript and all the modern conveniences.
I’m curious, what kinda hardware do you work on?
Digital hardware, mainly top-level design in verilog and associated checks using python/perl (sad)
Right now working on a GPU which is fun!
Ah alright 🙂 My pleasure! Yeah I wouldn’t even consider JSDoc if I had the choice of TypeScript. I even did some years of Advent Of Code in TypeScript. It’s performant enough and simple to employ some kind of quasi functional programming style with it. I think it’s great.
I think Rich Harris famously migrated Svelte from TypeScript to JSDoc, while still supporting TypeScript via JSDoc. I don’t use Svelte, so I have no idea how well this works in practice. However, Rick Harris seems smart to me, unlike other overly opinionated devs like DHH. I still wouldn’t use JSDoc over TS, but I guess if it works for your project, who cares. What matters is that we all remember the one true enemy, DHH
Why is transpilation unappealing to you?
Being honest, I’m an outsider looking in. Most likely these things are solved problems, but alternates are always interesting to hear insider opinions on.
Sounds like it’s developer experience Vs required post processing in this case, which is a reasonable tradeoff to think about
i wish a more performing language would have this type system. the only other ones I know are Rust which is a bit strict and slow to dev on, and Haskell which is too much.
Fully agree.
I hear good things about OCaml? Anyone tried that?
I asked chatgpt for a few languages with a good typesystem and it suggested ocaml among other (scala, rust, haskell, f#)
Then asked for a 100 line ocaml REST API example with a popular framework and db lib… and it looks mostly like Haskell.
edit: async is done with monads
If it looks mostly like Haskell but has better tooling, I’m in. I have yet to manage to successfully set up a Haskell environment on my own PC. 😅 I am obviously missing something.
I think ghcup is the simplest way
I used it either through my distro’s package or using stack install. there’s also cabal install, but that doesn’t install the compiler, at least not in 2017 when I played with it.
It’s funny because I learned to program with strongly types languages and when I moved over to JavaScript I always complained about it for the longest time but now that I use mostly typescript at work I kind of miss some of the old JavaScript patterns and their flexibility. But for working with large teams or large projects in general it’s nice to have typescript
JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.
Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.
Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.
It’s silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it’s ironic that it’s because they don’t know how to code, but here we are.
If you care this much about JS being cringe I don’t trust you to contribute good code to a project anyways
People on here really think the language determines the quality of the project lol
Not determine, but allows. C is a shitty language too. Linux is great because Linus bars off shitty contributors.
A few lists of javascript WTFs:
- https://javascriptwtf.com/
- https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs
- https://wtfjs.com/ (last updated 2016 but most of these things can/will never be fixed)
To anyone who thinks they know JS well and that its quirkiness is not a problem, let me know how you do on these quizzes:
You’re not wrong, but newer version of the language have steered devs away from these quirks. The quirks remain because the JavaScript language is 100% backwards compatible. It’s fun to laugh at these quirks, but I’ve been a full time JavaScript developer for 4 years and part time since 2015, and I’ve never seen any of these quirks come up in the real world. If you tell your developers to use === instead of == in code review, you eliminate most of the problems imo.
JavaScript tooling deserves more hate imo. The ecosystem is kinda a disaster, but Vite is making a lot of progress in fixing that. If you ignore React Native and metro bundler, I think the state of web is looking pretty optimistic right now. At least from a technology perspective. From a business/AI/enshitification perspective we’re cooked lol
this quirkiness doesn’t materialise in real world applications on any scale that makes it harder to deal with than the alternatives.
I got a little under half in the first two, which I’m very happy with haha. JS certainly has some quirks, but you’ve really got to go looking for them IMO. TypeScript resolves most of these issues with comparing types, and the rest aren’t that unique to JS.
Unless you are making a HTML/CSS only site (based) what do you want to use instead?
Invent a new internet where you can script pages directly in Python or TypeScript.
Otherwise, you get to enjoy a silly toy language from the 90’s.
I’m 100% sure I can make Rust code (not even compiled to WASM) run natively in a browser like Firefox, given I have enough will power, time, energy, and money. The problem is getting everyone else to agree to this new standard.
In a scripting language, is there an advantage to no garbage collection? (I honestly don’t know)
Someone else also pointed out to me, when I made a similar suggestion, that ability to partially fail but keep going is desirable in a web context. I don’t know, maybe there’s some way to make Rust do that more automatically than C. Python seems the be the standard for general-purpose scripting, which is why I mentioned it.
I’m on, but no one is interested.
Kotlin/JS would be my first choice ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
JavaScript really depends on the people writing it restricting themselves to a sane (ish) subset, just like C++
My personal gripe with JavaScript is how horribly slow it is. C++ at least has the merit of being fast once compiled. I wouldn’t feel great contributing to a JS project knowing fully well that a rewrite in a faster language would be 10x as effective as anything I could improve as is.
That’s funny because I - having not written much C++ - have an irrational hate of the language. But I like JavaScript. I think I need to look at C++ through the same lens I look at JS through.
Imo you can write pretty performant websites in JS. I guess it depends what you’re doing, but e.g. if you pay attention to you’re rerenders in React, you’re gonna have a much better time.
But I also totally understand as soon as you wanna do some compex stuff, JavaScript is not a good time. I don’t think webassembly has worked as smoothly as promised, but in theory, that should let you bring some C++ into the browser.
JavaScript is great for making websites !
Javascript turn our computers into toasters
You know what they say! All Javascripts Toasts Computers!
And our toasters into computers
That would be java i guess
I like minecraft
Genuinely curious, how many of you hating on JS have done professional frontend work recently? If you have done professional work, was it part/full time, using TypeScript, how big was your eng team, did you have to worry about Server Side Rendering? Maybe some extra context will show certain types of projects yield devs that hate the language.
I like JavaScript a lot and would be excited by its use in this context.
The Cinnamon desktop environment found in Linux Mint uses JavaScript on the back-end. My knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond that (other DEs, and what they do, nor the full extent of JS in Cinnamon), but I did look at it at one point.
Makes me wonder if OP was talking it about that in particular or if there’s some other project with a bundled JS interpreter they decided not to work with.
I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.
More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I’d like to add some more ‘robust and flexible’ algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it’s written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.
I’ve spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it’s not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.
So true.
This meme should be rewritten in js
Written in PHP
deleted by creator
I don’t know what you mean by supports tray but have you tried KDE connect? It has a lot more features than just sending files but I use it for a few things.
And if you don’t care about having GUI, I love miniserve for sharing files. It’ll open a web server and you can connect to it to download/upload files.
Localsend is built with Dart/Flutter.
The same but different.
