I don't think anyone benefits from watering down the definition of "good" to the point where it describes Javascript. Javascript – sorry, modern Javascript – sorry, surfing a compile-to-JS liferaft atop a thick and constantly shifting foam of tooling and libraries disgorged by literal person-millennia of community effort – can be surprisingly decent if you're careful.
Any meaningful definition of good has to draw a line between things that are and things that aren't. The definition here is broad enough to include basically any language that is popular. C++ is also good because it has a good syntax for the things people use C++ for, a big community that builds tools for it, and it has quirks but come on every language has quirks.
"Just because you disagree with the decisions doesn't make the language bad" is a funny way of describing absolute bald-faced mistakes like typeof null == 'object', the baggage of 20 years of browser quirks (JS tristate logic: true, false, and document.all), and "no that was totally intentional minimalism" oversights like the lack of coherent collections and iteration primitives.
When I think about good, I think about Rust's memory model, Erlang/OTP's supervisor trees, Java's standard library, Clojure's immutable data structures, Python's syntax, .NET's LINQ, Haskell's type system, Idris's type system, Go's mascot, or Elm's delightful mix of programming language and solo performance art piece.
Despite the author's attempt to head this criticism off, the reason we use Javascript really is just because it's in the web browsers. Web developers had to use it, so we made the best of it. We wrote libraries and tools to make it bearable, we built new languages on top of it so we didn't have to deal with its bullshit, and once Ballmer quit ruining the internet we built those improvements back into the language itself.
But is that good? Layers upon layers of accreted improvements, each with more legacy carve-outs than the last? "We can never throw away a bad idea" is a one-way complexity ratchet that precludes unqualified goodness unless there were no bad ideas to begin with. With Javascript, that is not the case. The best it will ever achieve is that it has good parts.
If INTERCAL was the de facto language of the web, we'd be writing Medium posts about the benefits of Automatic PLEASE Insertion and how excited we are for ASYNC COME FROM to land in INTERCAL2018. And, hey, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done, there's a good community, and at least it's not Objective Malbolge. Who are we to criticise?
>how excited we are for ASYNC COME FROM to land in INTERCAL2018. And, hey, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done, there's a good community, and at least it's not Objective Malbolge.
That made my day and next few mornings, thank you.
Any meaningful definition of good has to draw a line between things that are and things that aren't. The definition here is broad enough to include basically any language that is popular. C++ is also good because it has a good syntax for the things people use C++ for, a big community that builds tools for it, and it has quirks but come on every language has quirks.
"Just because you disagree with the decisions doesn't make the language bad" is a funny way of describing absolute bald-faced mistakes like typeof null == 'object', the baggage of 20 years of browser quirks (JS tristate logic: true, false, and document.all), and "no that was totally intentional minimalism" oversights like the lack of coherent collections and iteration primitives.
When I think about good, I think about Rust's memory model, Erlang/OTP's supervisor trees, Java's standard library, Clojure's immutable data structures, Python's syntax, .NET's LINQ, Haskell's type system, Idris's type system, Go's mascot, or Elm's delightful mix of programming language and solo performance art piece.
Despite the author's attempt to head this criticism off, the reason we use Javascript really is just because it's in the web browsers. Web developers had to use it, so we made the best of it. We wrote libraries and tools to make it bearable, we built new languages on top of it so we didn't have to deal with its bullshit, and once Ballmer quit ruining the internet we built those improvements back into the language itself.
But is that good? Layers upon layers of accreted improvements, each with more legacy carve-outs than the last? "We can never throw away a bad idea" is a one-way complexity ratchet that precludes unqualified goodness unless there were no bad ideas to begin with. With Javascript, that is not the case. The best it will ever achieve is that it has good parts.
If INTERCAL was the de facto language of the web, we'd be writing Medium posts about the benefits of Automatic PLEASE Insertion and how excited we are for ASYNC COME FROM to land in INTERCAL2018. And, hey, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done, there's a good community, and at least it's not Objective Malbolge. Who are we to criticise?