Comments by "Vitaly L" (@vitalyl1327) on "Why Does Everyone HATE JavaScript? (Yet Still Use It?)" video.

the key is to stay away from anything related to web, this way you won't get exposed to javascript. I so far managed to never touch it, in an over 30 years career.
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@YonoZekenZoid the claim was that "JS is great for learning functional programming.". It's not. Not even close. It's an awful language with some features distantly resembling some of the lesser features of functional languages, at most. It makes no sense at all to explore functional programming with such an awful language.
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The funny thing is that back then there were much better options, yet, for some reason, an awful javascript was invented. It simply should have never existed.
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there is a lot to hate in javascript without even touching any stupid OOP. To start with, no integer data types. Should have been a complete show stopper, yet people somehow swallowed this insult of a language. Then an awful mess of dynamic and static scoping. Why? And saying that Scheme was an inspiration for this abomination is another insult - it's not even close to 1/100th of Scheme.
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if you're given a hammer made of dung and told that it's the only tool you're allowed to use, will you hate those who put you in this position? I bet you would. And JS is exactly this hammer made of dung, when what you really need is a full garage of tools and machines.
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@Luxcium is it? "Unique"? You're giving too much credit to this ill designed Frankenstein monster language.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite well, you can always implement a pure lambda interpreter in Javascript (or a G-machine, if you want to do some really hideous obfuscation). My point was that learning functional programming from the bottom up, without a language interfering, is quite beneficial - you'll get a deeper understanding, and you'll have powerful tools you can use in scenarios where nothing else can work - e.g., in dependent type systems, in proof assistants, in total languages, etc.
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You never seen any proper language than, if you think Javascript is capable...
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There is nothing Lispy in JS. No homoiconicity (and that's what make Lisp a Liso), no macros. It is not expression-based. It is not late 80s to call any language with GC a Lisp flavour.
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I'm so glad I never had to touch Javascript and likely never will have to do anything with it. It's a very badly designed language, almost as bad as Python, and it's a real shame it's forced upon everyone who need to do anything in a browser.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite well, you can learn FP in a MIPS assembly then, with pretty much the same effect. JS is just as far from any reasonably functional language.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite so, you're saying that it's easy to learn FP in JS if you only know JS. This is a much weaker form of the original claim that JS is great for learning FP. I believe in systematic learning and for this reason I think it's better to learn FP starting with pure lambda calculus or combinatory logic. Without any "real" programming languages and all the unnecessary cruft they're unavoidably adding. For the same reason I believe it makes sense to stay away from type systems as well when you're starting learning FP - they're most naturally added later (lambda cube is better built from the untyped lambda corner).
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@ApprendreSansNecessite Try to evaluate the following term in an eager order: `(\y . \z . z) ((\x . (x x)) (\x . (x x)))` Note that it's supposed to yield `\z. z` if evaluated in lazy order, and the second part is discarded, as it should be. It won't ever terminate if evaluated in an eager order.
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@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 tooling - yes, absolutely, Javascript got the best JIT compilers out there, for example. I am talking about the language itself, and the language is among the worst ever created by humanity.
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@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 brainfuck is not bad at all, for its purpose. It was designed to teach Turing machines and to explore how potential future TM-based computers can be used (think of, say, DNA computing). Assembly is not "horrible" too - it's just a reflection of the actual hardware. Basic is remarkably simple and can be implemented on a really rightly constrained hardware. Not bad at all either. Though Forth is even better, but for the teaching purposes Basic was the right thing to happen. While for JavaScript there is no excuse at all. No single reason for it to exist. It should have never been created in the first place.
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@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 language is defined by its purpose. A language that fits a purpose, which have a nice, clean semantics that reflects the purpose, the problem domain as closely as possible is a well designed language. In this regard, Brainfuck is perfect, and not just that, it's beautiful. While JS serves no purpose. It was not derived in any way from its supposed problem domain. It's inconsistent, its semantics is even hard to define (it shows that the language was just jotted in a couple of days, and no spec was written before the implementation started). If a PL theorist tried to build a language for the niche occupied by JS, it'd be a very different language. Most likely, something similar to Scheme. If a PL theorist had to create an accessible language with a dense encoding for a 4kb RAM, 8080 CPU device, they're likely to reinvent Basic, given that Forth is deemed too alien to the target audience and teaching purposes.
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now ask any PL theorist what they think of JS. Language is objectively very poorly designed.
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@TheBoing2001 Again, javascript is a really crappy language, and it's not equipped with any of the powerful tools for creating higher levels of abstraction. Clearly you know very little about programming languages if you don't see how limiting JS is in comparison to the real languages. If you're very determined, sure, you can build nice things with it. But it's a massive waste of time and effort, and a better tool would have been much more suitable.
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@TheBoing2001 your answer got deleted, apparently, for having URLs. "Javascript is fine." - no, it is not. It's a crappy language devoid of any tools for creating higher level abstractions without suffering too high performance costs. Namely, no proper macros, and no proper control over code generation. "With 3 other click you can C&P and run entire chess game" - mind you, a chess engine was one of the first programs Konrad Zuze wrote for his primitive computer in 1945. Hardly an impressive achievement in the 21st century. Clearly you're a fanboy and you don't know anything at all about PLT, so you cannot see how deeply flawed JS is. And, no, ease of deployment is not a virtue of JS the language. It did not facilitate this cross-platform deployment in any way. It's simply the result of web standards monopoly. If Tcl/Tk was such a standard, you could deploy a Tcl/Tk application everywhere equally effortlessly. So your argument makes zero sense. Now go and learn some computer science, you're clearly lacking the most basic education.
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you're just saying that "worse is better". You're right. Humanity have a tendency for falling for the worst possible solution when multiple options are available. Did it over and over again. Javascript is a perfect example of such, an extremely awful language design, made at a time when PLT was already extremely advanced and people knew exactly how to construct languages fit for any given purpose.
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Not all languages. Some are vastly more awful than the others. Good languages tend to be designed by people who know what they're doing, who have a deep knowledge in PLT and in compiler construction. Really bad languages, like Javascript, PHP and Python, tend to be designed by eager amateurs. Somewhat less crappy languages are designed by amateurs but later fixed (or at least specified) by professionals - case in point here is Java, with spec written by Guy Steele Jr.
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@chrisjsewell I'd say both Python and JS are exceptionally awful scripting languages and must be avoided. There are far better options.
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@chrisjsewell various Scheme implementations, for example - including the official GNU scripting engine, Guile, and more performant alternatives like Racket. LuaJIT is also very good. Raw Lua is very small footprint and still very capable. Various Forth implementations can be extremely small footprint and yet nearly infinitely capable due to the meta nature of the language. Even Tcl have its place, and often is a right tool for embedded scripting (in this one I might be biased, as nearly all EDA tools are scripted with Tcl).
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@ApprendreSansNecessite language with separate statement and expressions cannot be called functional language, full stop.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite It's either lambda calculus (which only have expressions), or statements. Not both. ADTs have nothing to do with FP (besides being mostly explored by FP-first languages). Recursion in JS is useless for the lack of tail call optimisation guarantee. But first and foremost, FP = lambda calculus, and lambda calculus is expression-based. Another mandatory thing for FP is strict static scoping. Everything else is optional, but expression-based language, unlimited tail recursion and strict static scoping are mandatory.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite there is an important property in the pure lambda calculus that is missing from eager languages - it assumes lazy evaluation (to be practical). If your language is eager order, you cannot have a pure lambda, you need at the very least a built in 'if'', along with 'true" and 'false' in some form. So you already cannot get to understand the most essential properties of lambda calculus if you're doing it in an unsuitable (too big and complex) language.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite later I will produce an example when eager order makes it impossible to evaluate a term (hard to do so typing on a mobile). Sure, learning FP with whatever tools you have is better than not learning at all. Just keep in mind that results of such learning may be quite incomplete. JS is very far from an "ideal" language for anything, not just learning FP, and the only virtue it have is (and you seem to agree) is that a newbie is likely to already know some bits of JS due to its popularity and accessibility. It is a new Basic in this regard. Which is rather sad.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite it's a really bad term. Compilation does not define what's the level of the source and target language. A lot of modern compilers consists of dozens of tiny compilers that translate a language into a nearly equivalent language, with some minor changes. Adding some babble like "transpiler" to the mix just confuse people and obscures the meaning of compilation.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite the word "transpiler" is from colloquial use indeed, you'll never meet it in any PLT papers. So it's important to remind people once in a while that the term is unscientific and is better avoided altogether for adding no real value.
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oh, really? Any developer must master dozens of languages. Any capable developer must continuously create new small languages, because Language-Oriented Programming is by far the most powerful abstraction tool. A developer with only one language under their belt, especially such a crippled and ill-designed language as JS, is not a real developer. Want to be "full stack"? Master the entire stack underneath your level of abstraction. Starting with analog and digital electronics, HDLs, all the necessary elements of computer architecture, all the PLT-related mathematics, PLT itself, a deep understanding of compilation and interpretation methods available, a deep understanding of how operating systems work (and when and where to use them or ditch them altogether). Understand networking, from PHY levels to high level protocols, and know where you should be on this stack of abstractions depending on your goals. There's a lot of critically important knowledge there. Javascript, browsers and all that meh are not among even the tangentially impactful pieces of knowledge.
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To summarise - the language you must be a native speaker of should be the language of mathematics. All the programming languages are just special cases of it, once you have a solid grasp of the real language of the universe.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite the downsides of compiling to JS and alike is that the runtime itself is rather crappy (no integers, really? and a very intrusive GC), and, more importantly, if JS is your common denominator language, it limits what your static analysis can do (pretty much nothing for such an extreme dynamic language). The only reason to ever do such a thing is if your code must run in a browser. No point in running JS anywhere else.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite I'm yet to see a single compelling argument for using the same language for different components of a system, be it "client side" and "server side" in a context of web development, or anything else. And the argument "our engineers are just not good enough and can only use one language" is really a bad argument. And yes, I'm aware that there are web developers who style themselves arrogantly as "full stack" developers. They need to be constantly reminded how thin and tiny their coverage of the tech stack is, and how much more they could have achieved if they were actually full-stack.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite in a multi-language environment you're limited to an underlying target language semantics for your analysis. And if its semantics is designed to hamper any analysis attempts, you cannot prove anything about your system as a whole. Typescript does not help, as it's not a compilation target for any of the higher level languages you're talking about. Also, even Typescript does not remove the dynamic nature of the underlying language, so even a heavily annotated typescript code cannot really be reasoned about.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite for me, it sounds like a weird design, when similar data processing happens in different parts of the system. For data model - yes, it can be the same while flowing through the system, but it does not mandate the same language that handles the data in any way. Validation is normally just a part of the data model. And things like data model, validation, etc., should be defined in a higher level (ideally, declarative) language anyway, and then translated into whatever language whatever part of the system is using. You're likely familiar with rudimentary forms of this approach employed in IDL and similar protocol / data model description languages. There's often dozens of languages involved, with a single data model in between them. I admit I stay away from anything related to web, so may be unaware of some of the rationalisation behind common design choices in that world. From far away, the whole web stack looks like it's massively overengineered and badly designed on all levels though.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite I believe this sort of behaviour still falls under data model specification and must be declarative. When it is some ad hoc low level code manually screwed together, it is unavoidably a huge source of errors and worse. I never cared at all about anything web. But I did a lot of work with distributed systems shuffling huge variety of data around, including very sensitive data in financial applications (that also included high frequency trading). Every single time, some form of IDL was the only reasonable solution, and sharing validation / processing code between system components was never a meaningful design choice.
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It can't even do guaranteed TCO. How can you FP with it?
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@edgeeffect some languages were designed by PLTists, e.g., Scheme.
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Many languages, some are good, some are mediocre, but none as awful as JS. I use C, C++, various flavours of Lisp (including Scheme), Tcl, Verilog, ocaml, and a few more, including even Fortran. Nothing is as ill designed as JS.
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but imagine how fun it'll be if you'd do all these things with an actually capable language that does not cripple your creativity? Only people who had little exposure to the other languages and programming models can genuinely believe JavaScript is a right tool for expressing their ideas.
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@awmy3109 oh, how cute, to assume that IO is always a bottleneck and that you do not pay very dearly in performance for crappy abstractions and abstrraction-enabling features like GC and duck typing. You do pay, a lot, in orders of magnitude of performance difference.
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@awmy3109 also, no, it is not a "fact" that IO is somehow always a bottleneck. This is something only a narrow minded web coder can say, who have no idea how huge the world outside of his pathetic web stack is.
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@awmy3109 somehow my long answer got lost. Again: GC, dynamic typing, virtual calls are abstraction-enabling tools that harm optimisation and cost a lot in runtime.performance. This is why your JS is orders of magnitude slower than my C++.
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@awmy3109 right, what a great argument! Since only JS is available in a web browser, JS is somehow now a great and performant language. Simply for a virtue of monopoly. Nice. But this is not what OP was talking about. This is how people with experience from outside of web see the web ghetto. Any time we take a closer look we recoil in disgust. This whole web thing is a pile upon piles of utter crap, and it should have never been like this. Also, people like you are very often guilty of not even trying to think if they really need to build a "web app". Turns out, very often they should not, but they still do, because this is all they know. A lot of time a native application is a far better solution. Even more often, no UI at all is even better, yet, the people with such a severe professional deformation fail to see it. Now, you claimed JS is somehow performant (we know it's not, not even close). You claimed you don't pay for abstractions in such a language. Wrong again, you pay dearly. Admit you're wrong and stop moving the goal posts.
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@rentefald You most certainly can write game engines from scratch. If you believe you cannot, you must stay as far away from programming as possible, as you're a part of the problem of massive overengineering of pretty much everything.
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really? Have you ever seen any proper dependently typed language?
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@salvatoreshiggerino6810 Ada (SPARK) is what both pays well and got a really good type system. And projects tend to be far more exciting than the typical corporate stuff - automotive, aerospace, other kinds of high reliability embedded...
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No. There was never any Java in Netscape. They just wanted to jump on a hype bandwagon, as Java was becoming popular in the corporate world.
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@pompiuses there's a caveat - Java is best performing only if you write it in such a way that GC does not have much to do. I had to deal with a few Java real-time GC implementations, it always boils down to writing in a very restricted subset of Java and continuously questioning - why the heck we did not just use C++? As for thoughput performance - yes, JRE is one of the best, and GCs available for it are very mature.
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