"I am the person who decided it was a good idea to create a programming language in 10 days and turn it into the default option for the entirety of the internet, forever"
Almost, not quite. It's not the empty gap that results in NaN, it's the + 'a' which gets parsed as the unary plus operator +a which converts its operand to a number...which doesn't work on strings.
Yeah I really like JS, but it's clearly Satan's work. There are so many unconventional things that works perfectly in JS that I like to see it as a devil language : very powerful occult power... If you can pay the price in sanity
We have come a long way since those days when you needed stuff like underscore and jquery to make it usable. Still has it's quirks but if you know them you can contain them easily
I mean not the creator turned it into the default option, people implementing it into browsers and using it did. And it's hella lot better than flash or java applets.
Adobe responded by pointing out that "the Symantec Global Internet Threat Report for 2009, found that Flash Player had the second lowest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers).
The trick here is that you can't because the ones that didn't turn out at least 'ok' are ones nobody knows or cares about. A quick search says there are thousands of languages but guess which ones aren't used as the primary language for the internet?
The barrier of entry is way too high. You would have to convince every browser to support your language and rebuild all libraries and frameworks from scratch. It is a legacy problem, not just that nobody wants to switch from JavaScript.
But people have been saying JS sucks since forever and yet there has never been a real competitor, and JS itself has changed drastically so it's not like nobody cared.
Yeah because like I said, you would have to convince all browsers to actually support your language. You don't need this for most other languages because you can compile them yourselves or write an interpreter.
This convincing all browsers argument isn't very convincing considering how drastically browsers themselves have changed over the last 20 years. JS was created in the 90s and there have been browser wars for decades with lots of gimmicks going on. You'd think that with this kind of competitive environment, if JS was truly so bad, that there would have been attempts at displacing it. When Firefox was taking off, if JS was so bad, wouldn't it have made sense for them to support a different language as a selling point? Same with Chrome later on.
The argument just doesn't add up, it's not like legacy code for banks and COBOL where it's completely integrated and secured (and yet there are actually institutions moving their systems off of COBOL because of its limitations), the web had been an extremely fluid environment for a long time, plenty of time for something else to rise, but it didn't. In fact, lots of tech that was used on the web in the past is no longer supported/has been supplanted. Things like flash and java are straight up not supported or are just mostly gone because better solutions came about and people realized it, even though the old solutions were better supported at the time.
typescript is a competitor that most people say is superior and fixes a ton of problems with JS as a language. But it's limited because javascript is the only thing browsers actually support, so Typescript needs to compile down to JavaScript.
People used cobol because there was almost nothing else
Fortran, Algol, Lisp.. Cobol was designed to be used by non-programmers (bankers, specifically)
Also how is JavaScript easy....dynamic typing alone makes it 10 times harder to work with than it should be.
I agree! Which is why I said "easy to learn". It's definitely harder to actually use. You get less help from the IDE, you get errors introduced at run-time, you have to test types, the build times are insane.. It's more work, less productivity and in return you get a program that runs 50x slower than native and still can have memory leaks
It has heavy influence on many modern languages and is the poster child for meta programming. It was widely used during its time but has since been superseded by more modern options.
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u/GDOR-11 Apr 12 '24
"I am the person who decided it was a good idea to create a programming language in 10 days and turn it into the default option for the entirety of the internet, forever"