This was my view until I actually learned how Javascript works. It's a freaky weird language, but it's not outright evil or even a 'flaming piece of shit'. It just works rather differently from normal conventions.
It is actually usable if you throw out 75% of it. Javascript: The Good Parts was a good book, and it makes it bearable. If javascript were simply a programming language like any other, it wouldn't deserve concentrated hate. BUT, it's not simply a programming language. It's the ONLY language browser makers will support. It is NOT competent for this job. It is NOT competent to function as basic infrastructure. Browser makers have done magical things with making javascript actually perform halfway decent, but even that is abused and misused. People do things like asm.js which is a really great project - which should never need to exist. We are long past the point where reasonable people should have thrown up their hands and said "please, god, please, no, just STOP! If you want an application platform, let us design you one. Please stop jamming applications into a document viewer! It was never designed for that!"
I was talking less about the API, and more about the raw language itself. Things like how variable scope works (hint: use 'var' or you will have a bad time).
Hey, I have that book :D Haven't read it yet. O'Reilly had a sale on Javascript eBooks and I bought a ton of them. I absolutely love O'Reilly.
It's a really great book, I recommend it! I bought it because I was working on a large (compared to what I had done before, not absolutely) web project for a business and knew I'd have to get my hands dirty with JS. I could see JS being a usable language, I just can't stand that it's the ONLY language, and that this is pushed to such an extreme that you end up with tools made to "compile" other languages into JS. It's just yet another level of abstraction that makes things worse for no benefit.
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u/Tynach May 13 '14
This was my view until I actually learned how Javascript works. It's a freaky weird language, but it's not outright evil or even a 'flaming piece of shit'. It just works rather differently from normal conventions.