Douglas Crockford: "The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it."

https://evrone.com/douglas-crockfor...

Just another "everything from scratch" shithead.

You don't say. And then what? There's no alternative

@Fast-Nop imo given his bio and work he did on JS (incl. being part of ESCMAScript comittee), I guess he got to a point where he decided JS is beyond salvation.

@qwwerty He has no point because who will pay for his idea when ditching all the existing JS software? He himself? Oh no, he's just about having bright ideas about what to do with other people's money. That's why he is a shithead.

@Fast-Nop sticking with flawed designs just so people don't have to upgrade anything is your general approach?

What i'm reading there is "start thinking about what can we do better in the future because we're out of ideas how to fix this one" not yours "drop everything right now and start re-doing it". There is no horizon for transition and imho most of the current apps will be obsolete/rewritten in 10-20 years anyway.

@qwwerty Devs are totally in favour of the "everything from scratch" approach, and that's why devs don't lead companies. It's a major strategic mistake for any company, as Joel Spolsky pointed out two decades ago: https://joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/...

If there is no compatible upgrade path not only for the apps, but the whole ecosystem, it won't be done. It's as easy as that. There is no strategic benefit, not even the guarantee that it will be better this time, and devs circlejerking is no valid point.

I hate Electron. But I don't hate Javascript. JS can stay if it stays on browsers.

Don't push them into native apps!

Tell Douglas Crockford to suck it.
All my homies hate Crockford.

Often JavaScript is just the easiest language to use for a task. It has really nice string and array methods relative to other languages. Does it scale great: not always. But a lot of the people I've heard say that about it have never even been a part of writing a genuinely scalable system that isn't 9/10 parts superglue and bandaids.

@qwwerty Yeah, and the author of NodeJS though Node should be discontinued and replaced by Deno. 4 years later and no such thing has happened, nor does it look like it's going to happen anytime soon. Not to mention all the dumb decisions Guido made regarding Python syntax, like how ("a", "b" "c", "d") not only works, but gives ("a", "bc", "d") (this exact bug is extremely common in many popular Python projects, iirc there was an article stating that 600 out of 1000 most popular Python projects on GitHub had it at least somewhere in the code).

If you look at other fields, antivaxxers love to cite various doctors and nurses in their bullshit, even though those people are neither pharmacist nor microbiologists and often don't understand those topics beyond what they need to know to administer drugs.

People in charge of standardising programming language and its syntax often don't know much about wider context unless they actively use said languages for some large-scale purposes.

@hitko Also, problems like the crazy toolchains and NPM aren't rooted in JS itself to begin with, and neither is the rampant abuse of JS for stuff that is the job of CSS or even HTML.

Plus that new languages are a dime a dozen, but what about dev availability? JS devs are abundant, but what about Crockford's pet peeve language? Did he actually try hiring devs for a real project? Probably not because he has no clue about reality from his ivory tower.

While TypeScript is far from being perfect, it is a natural upgrade for JavaScript and available right now. Better Integration into browsers - so you can debug it in its original form instead of the transpiled JavaScript - would be an improvement.

Not sure why he doesn't see that obvious upgrade path.

@Oktokolo devil's advocate: at the end of the day though it's just a layer over JavaScript and not a from-the-ground-up strongly typed language designed for anything other than the web browser...

The generics are a bit of a train-wreck tbh and I don't see those getting properly fixed any time soon

@PeterDCarter Yep. It is still better than having just JavaScript forever though.

@Oktokolo WASM 🤣

@PeterDCarter 🤣 indeed. I can transpile anything to JavaScript already. What is missing is the support for debugging the original code inside the browser. I wouldn't want to step through WASM code instead of JavaScript code.

Honestly JavaScript is excellent for the browser, which is where it was originally intended for.

It's single threaded by design, simple, and duck typed. Most of front end should just be simple user interaction anyways, generally heavy lifting with data and such can be more accurately calculated in the back end.

So for UI manipulation, JavaScript is nice. Though I wouldn't mind replacing it with something comparable, like Lua.

The only issue is the catastrophic scope creep it's experiencing. Really? We're using it for desktop and server applications? We're transpiling strongly typed languages to it and sending it into outer space?.... That's an abomination.

@Oktokolo you can debug TypeScript in the browser using map files, right?

Not a big TS guy, I like my JavaScript raw and itchy.

@AlgoRythm Now that you say it, i remember, that we omited them because someone feared that the extension would get too big or something. Totally forgot about them.

@AlgoRythm if only it was not weakly typed, it would be great.

Like python. It's not weakly typed and it's better.

Btw, Lua is a neat simple language. Used it for TTS and it was quite okay.