Hey Everybody! Let’s Shit on JS!

From my Facebook post:

Do you know how to write it correctly before you shit on it? No? Then gtfoh with your bullshit. No language is perfect. ABSOLUTELY NONE. Learn how to write it, learn its intricacies. Then talk to me about how terrible it is. As defensive as I am here, I know JavaScript is sucking hard right now. I know this. There are things about JavaScript that absolutely puzzle me as a new developer, for instance you can’t sort the properties of an Object but you can sort the properties of an Array, which is an object. This makes little sense to newbies. I was informed that Arrays have ordered data and Objects have unordered data, and that sorting an Object would be like sorting an unordered list in HTML.

It made more sense to me after this explanation. So can we really call an Array an Object then? How can an Array be an Object when it has ordered data? Does this have to do with prototypes? I am assuming it does.

But JavaScript isn’t the only language that has this type of garbage. It isn’t as eloquent as Ruby. It doesn’t need to be. They are accomplishing two different things.

Complexity in JavaScript can be a good thing, if people know how to wield that power. Like every language, it has good parts and bad parts.

We could talk about NPM and having a JSON file with 200 dependencies. But what about depending on Ruby gems? Could you break your site with an updated gem that you know nothing about? Absolutely. Can you have 200 dependencies in your Make file? I don’t know. But when I have done a bundle install for whatever project I am working on, there are lots of gems downloaded to the Make file.

Micro-dependencies to hide complexity isn’t something we should be doing. Maybe this is a flaw in npm but I really don’t like it and think it’s a bad idea, generally.

Strive to have as few dependencies as possible, where possible. This isn’t a JavaScript thing. Less gems, less npm modules, less swift packages. Just write good code. If you’re a shitty developer, you probably couldn’t care less about any of this. This type of laziness isn’t quarantined to the JavaScript community so let’s stop pretending that is.

From my Facebook post:

Do you know how to write it correctly before you shit on it? No? Then gtfoh with your bullshit. No language is perfect. ABSOLUTELY NONE. Learn how to write it, learn its intricacies. Then talk to me about how terrible it is. As defensive as I am here, I know JavaScript is sucking hard right now. I know this. There are things about JavaScript that absolutely puzzle me as a new developer, for instance you can’t sort the properties of an Object but you can sort the properties of an Array, which is an object. This makes little sense to newbies. I was informed that Arrays have ordered data and Objects have unordered data, and that sorting an Object would be like sorting an unordered list in HTML.

It made more sense to me after this explanation. So can we really call an Array an Object then? How can an Array be an Object when it has ordered data? Does this have to do with prototypes? I am assuming it does.

But JavaScript isn’t the only language that has this type of garbage. It isn’t as eloquent as Ruby. It doesn’t need to be. They are accomplishing two different things.

Complexity in JavaScript can be a good thing, if people know how to wield that power. Like every language, it has good parts and bad parts.

We could talk about NPM and having a JSON file with 200 dependencies. But what about depending on Ruby gems? Could you break your site with an updated gem that you know nothing about? Absolutely. Can you have 200 dependencies in your Make file? I don’t know. But when I have done a bundle install for whatever project I am working on, there are lots of gems downloaded to the Make file.

Micro-dependencies to hide complexity isn’t something we should be doing. Maybe this is a flaw in npm but I really don’t like it and think it’s a bad idea, generally.

Strive to have as few dependencies as possible, where possible. This isn’t a JavaScript thing. Less gems, less npm modules, less swift packages. Just write good code. If you’re a shitty developer, you probably couldn’t care less about any of this. This type of laziness isn’t quarantined to the JavaScript community so let’s stop pretending that is.