Jeez this is so true. I struggle daily to stay on top of the code and docs I have to review, answer people who are pinging me in slack, and being in meetings… I want to actually get some shit done!
I’m not too familiar with C, but I was under the impression that C++ was deceloped as a superset to C, and was capable of everything C could do. Is that not the case?
Every programming language is an abstraction layer between the programmer and the machine that will run the code. But abstraction isn’t free. Generally speaking, the higher the abstraction, the less efficient the program.
C++ optionally provides a much higher level of abstraction than pure C, which makes C++ much nicer to work with. But the trade off is that the program will struggle to run in resource constrained environments, where a program written in C would run just fine.
And to be clear, when I say “low-end hardware”, I’m not talking about the atom-based netbook from 2008 you picked up for $15 at a yard sale. It will run C++ based programs just fine. I’m talking about 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers running at <100 MHz with a couple of hundred kB of RAM. Such machines are still common in many embedded applications, and they do not handle C++ applications gracefully.
And speed too. A small program using only C features can compile 5x faster with a c compiler then a c++ one. (GCC will use c++ mode on a .cop file so make sure it is .c)
That’s true, but they’re working on an ABI implementation. It’s no mean feat with a language like Rust. A quick search around the Internet found various possible candidates, though many of the discussion threads have petered out.
Its cross-platform support (not just for using but also for building it) is not there yet, and it is quite huge and unstandardized with only one full implementation. I’d agree the last part will change with age, but given the frequent large changes and feature additions I am afraid it will be harder and harder and it is simply too complex and fast-moving for many low-level applications. It is closer to C++ than C in my eyes. I’d be happy seeing it replace C++ though for its memory safety benefits!
I wouldn’t say “need”, but there are possible improvements to ergonomics and safety that wouldn’t make the language itself more complex or high level. I think it does its job quite well though and will be here for decades to come.
Ada has been around since 1983 and is objectively superior. Yes I will die on that hill.
It’s too bad programmers are all such egotards they think they can write bugfree programs in C, while whining about how “restrictive” a safe language like Ada is.
One of us has spent the last three months trying to help their client untangle their massive python monolith that makes all their in house engineers quit.
Python is a good language for writing a data processing script, not for building a large piece of software.
Python is an overall robust language that allows you to do basically whatever you want, and does it pretty well. You can even use C extensions if you want to get peak performance.
The two domains that I believe Python cannot easily work with, are IoT where the interpreter would be a bit too cumbersome for a low-power system, and web programming, where it would still underperform Javascript and Webassembly (even though I am guessing that with a better webassembly support of the browsers, it would be possible to reach a rather efficient interpreter in-browser that would at least reach performances similar to javascript, if not better. And even if slower, the better syntax and lack of absurd rules would be a clear advantage on JavaScript).
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Lol I was listening and intently considering what you had to say until this
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> point.
</span>
even though I am guessing that with a better webassembly support of the browsers
Considering V8 overcame python in benchmarks nearly a decade ago, I’m not sure even some miraculous webassembly environment would put python faster than javascript in the browser of all places.
V8 does not quite compete with the big guns in the space (C, Rust, Go), but now that it’s only 2-4x slower than C++, it’s created this niche of “almost hardcore fast” for javascript that is just unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.
People fail to quite get how many leaps and bounds V8 has taken in the last 10-12 years. Javascript’s reputation of being “scripting language slow” is simply no longer the case and hasn’t been for an entire Era in software terms. Reasonably-written Javascript is now often faster than heavily-tuned Python, and well-written javascript is faster than reasonably-written C++. It’s not necessarily fair (like comparing modern solar to nuclear, with the absurd amount of money that’s gone into solar research), but I don’t see it changing any time soon.
dont listen to them my friend. python sucks. the only reason to use it is the libraries. otherwise use lua if you want a similar scripting language that doesnt care if you forget a space key
sure, but for small simple things (eg. something otherwise done in shell scripting), it is convenient and very simple, with consistent syntax. dont get me wrong: i love compiled languages
While true, there are some languages that are the wrong tool for every job. JS is one of them. I’ve dreamt of a future where web frontends switched to something sane but instead we got stuff like typescript which is like trying to erect steel beams in quicksand. For web frontends I can understand that historical reasons have lead to this but whoever came up with node thinking JS would be a great backend language has a lot of explaining to do.
I am also interested if anyone can tell me the exact time in our history when JavaScript turned from “Don’t you ever use that anywhere on your websites!” into “It’s basically every website”.
I happened to be a fullstack developer when the transition happened, so I saw it firsthand. I would say it predated V8 by a year or two. By the time V8 came out, I was already writing plenty of (simple) javascript for applications.
I would say it was more about plugged security holes and Ajax becoming more viable for real-world use. The “don’t ever use javascript” rule came from people disabling javascript because javascript was being used for malware. V8 was a part of that transition and growth, but at least in my memory not the shot that started it all.
There were developers (and books) pushing Rails+Ajax pretty hard in 2007, a full year before V8’s first release in September of 2008.
You’re right! I stand corrected and thank you for sharing. There were already big JS apps (notably, Gmail in 2004) before V8 came out. Yet, am I wrong to think Node.js started the JS obsession that lasted for a while?
I think that’s a hard question. Node definitely helped evolve it. The idea of isomorphism was slow-growing (and yes, originally pretty rocky), but foundational to what we now see as web development. But if I really had to describe the start of the “JS obsession” by my experience, it would be the AJAX explosion, which led to the advent of the “web-based app”. That very first moment of realization that yes, you can do anything on the web. It might be hard for a developer who started after that time, but functionality used to be relegated to windowed and console apps. In that world, you could imagine how useless javascript must have seemed - why do I need to write code to give “functionality” to what was basically seen as a remote pdf?
But then, I think there’s no surprise to the fact every big company under the sun has some critical contribution to server-side javascript. Back then, most of the dev world were using Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP for their web backends (Java, VB, and C# were used, but too damn hard to write in). At best, those languages were non-ideal but reasonably comparable to javascript. At worst, some of those languages (Perl, lookin at you) were worse than javascript at all the reasons people make fun of javascript now.
It took a while to kick Rails off the “next big thing” podium, but it was pretty quick that Node was showing offerings that were just better than Perl-catalyst or early Python-Django. It’s funny, Rails was the one with fancy ways to ship javascript from server routes (what a shit show that tech was) back when Node was establishing new best practices on non-isomorphic web apps. I remember when Hapi first came out, backed by Walmart. I then went from being a node hobbiest to believing it was the future. 1 year later I was running a scrappy little node team and we had this little $10M+ telephony app (of all things).
Come on, Javascript is pretty nasty. Trying to read that shit always gives me brain tumors. Why do they need to wrap every fucking thing in a function inside a function inside a function that is passed as a parameter to a function inside another function?
Like, bro, you know people are meant to understand what you just wrote?
It just gives too much freedom and people forget they need to write code that is easy to read for people who aren’t totally familiar with the code base.
They even bring that shit into typescript. Like they are already using a language that is meant to fix that shit and they are like, nope, let me create 5 nested functions just because.
Can you give an example of the multi nested functions? I was a TS dev for a while and don’t remember anything like that. Unless you mean the promise callback functions. Those were a mess but luckily we’ve mostly moved away from those
People creating functions as objects inside of other functions. A few days ago saw a person create a function with two object functions inside, then passed one of the functions as an argument to the other function. Then returned the second function.
It’s hard to find such a mess in other languages. Yeha, functions as objects are cool. Closures are also cool… But why abuse that shit?
So bizarre how life experience drives attitude. I’m one of those who has worked in a dozen languages, and Javascript (well, Typescript now) simply wins out for me. I run a C# team right now (have been for nearly a decade), and I can say as much as I love my job I hate the language. We get less done with slower code and with more bugs and more (very talented) people than the little $10M operation 4 of us did with node.js a couple jobs ago.
And as an aftethought since language and tooling are different topics… the ops toolchains for javascript are so much better than anything I’ve worked in any other language. Code released to production often ends up costing us less (dollar value) in the time to deploy, and then less per-user and per-hour.
I know a lot of C# diehards and I respect their passion. I just cannot relate to their experience. And I can say that with over a decade of experience in many of the languages in the original meme.
I’ve only used python as a bash alternative for scripting, even though I’ve heard it’s capable of more. Can you explain what makes it bad for larger/frontend projects?
Before 3.9 the lack of type hints made it a nightmare for large projects. Strong typing is, among other benefits, a way of self documentation and helps IDEs with auto-complete. If I use Python I always use type hints and if I have to use JS sigo with Typescript instead
Python without type hints is torture. I always need to have the fucking docs opened for anything, and if the docs are bad you’re screwed, get ready to read the source code. Like fucking hell man, just let me autocomplete this shit…
Ah ok, server side rendering with no JS. I mean, server-side rendering is good. But a front with no JS? Idk, the page would feel pretty outdated. I wonder if there modern front-ends with zero js.
May i ask why everyone hates JavaScript so much? It’s not ironic it’s a real question, i can’t really get it, is it just because it doesn’t have types? Or there’s more?
it has a lot of cruft and gotchas and lacks a good standard library (which is why npm is a thing). That means there’s a lot of bad javascript code out there and a lot of people who have had bad experiences with it. But, if you take care to not shoot yourself with the included footguns and you know your way around npm, it’s a perfectly fine language for its purposes in front- and backend development IMO
I think you’re misunderstanding what “everything” means (it was “everything needed for a hello world”) and trying to divert the discussion to whatever Web has devolved into, which is an abomination that’s definitely unsuited for learning the ropes of software development.
All ECMAScript is standardized because that refers to the standard.
I think you’re discounting the different environments that JS runs in. Something like C runs in a much more uniform environment (the OS) while JS must be able to run in different runtimes. It’s like how windows has APIs that C can access, but obviously you can’t access them when running C from other OSes (forgive me if that’s inaccurate, I don’t use C often).
I believe the amount of hate and mockery Javascript receives is heavily skewed, simply because almost every programmer who is active today has at least some experience with the language, and with more users there are also more people capable of complaining about it.
I work with languages that are much worse than Javascript, yet they don’t receive nearly as much hate because hardly anyone uses them.
As you may know SAP is a German company and the name originally was an acronym for SanduhrAnzeigeProgramm, which translates to “hourglass displaying program” - a nod to when busy software would change the mouse cursor into an hour glass - since it was initially conceived as a hardware stress test software - expanding to employee stress tests was just the logical next step.
Things got weird when scammers found a new hustle charging hundreds of dollars per hour pretending it was an ERP solution or similarly outrageous ideas that non-technical people in all kinds of business fell for.
Imo, both methods should set the same value for x. That’s madness. 🤪 Just look at awk for example. There’s a dedicated substr() and it doesn’t care about spaces. But then awk is quite loose in everything… and niche… But I love it.
Because it’s inescapable. Web development is by far the most common type of programming work and even if you’re a backend developer you tend to have to touch javascript at some point, so everyone knows the pain of javascript’s foot guns and javascript has a lot.
The fact that it’s mandatory to do your work invokes bitterness in people. For backend, you can kind of switch around until you find a language you like. For frontend, it’s javascript or nothing at all.
Javascript as a language is very out of sync with other commonly used languages. Its footguns are very easy to run into. As a result you have a lot of rituals around just not shooting yourself in the foot. The rituals, libraries, and frameworks around avoiding Javascript’s foot guns have been very shifting and changing. Of course, because the javascript ecosystem changes far faster than other languages, there are a lot of rakes for developers to step on to add to the naturally existing foot guns.
Javascript as a language probably shouldn’t be the sole language of the internet for a variety of reasons. It’s a very hateable language because of how easy it is for newbies to make new terrible code and how common it is. Until something like WASM takes off, the downpour of hate for javascript will continue.
Javascript as a language is very out of sync with other commonly used languages.
How so? Moving back and forth between Typescript and C# / Java is pretty natural imho, as long as you understand the compiled vs interpreted differences.
It’s wild that Python is getting a shoutout over javascript despite being an even bigger loosely typed mess.
I think it’s partially because Python has a reputation as being a serious language for serious people because it’s popular amongst data scientists and academics, whereas Javascript is still seen as being popular amongst script kiddies and people building crappy websites for $100 / pop.
That being said, most of the time i hear javascript jokes at work they’re pretty tongue in cheek /ironic / the dev isn’t really hating on it. I have heard a dev or two make those javascript jokes with a more serious critical tone, and everyone tends to ignore them and not engage because they’re pretty clearly just haters who have a general tendency to dislike popular things.
If by «loosely typed» you mean weakly typed, then that’s not true. Python is a dynamically and strongly typed language. Attempting to do an operation with incompatible types will result in a TypeError.
<span style="color:#323232;">>>> "3" + 9
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Traceback (most recent call last):
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> File "", line 1, in
</span><span style="color:#323232;">TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str
</span>
You may be thinking of the following, but this only works because the __mul__ and __add__ methods of these objects have been written to accept the other types.
<span style="color:#323232;">>>> "A" * 4 + "H"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">'AAAAH'
</span>
But it is in no way worse than javascript in that regard, though?
I don’t think static typing in Python is really so essential. I see it above all as a scripting language, so its applications don’t benefit as much from static typing as other languages do.
Maybe a better hypothetical python would have used some kind of type inference system, like in haskell, which allows for static typing while still allowing to write code unencumbered from types and stuff, but I really think, for Python’s target domain, its type system is actually adequate or good. Maybe its documentation could benefit from type hints, though.
But it is in no way worse than javascript in that regard, though?
No, but OPs original post was implying that it was better than JavaScript, when in my mind they’re pretty similar in that regard, with the major exception that there is no python equivalent of Typescript which is rapidly passing JavaScript in professional settings.
I don’t think static typing in Python is really so essential. I see it above all as a scripting language, so its applications don’t benefit as much from static typing as other languages do.
For a scripting language it’s fine, but problems arise when you start building giant applications with it (which does happen).
I’m a backend engineer. My biggest issue with JavaScript is environments that use it in the backend.
JavaScript is designed to run in a way that continue to try to do things even when it’s running in to errors. But it does that because I’m a front end that’s what you want. In the front end, working but ugly is better than not working at all. In the backend that can be catastrophic, though.
It has a lot of gotchas and an unstable ecosystem.
A lot of basic stuff is confusing of weird. How do you loop over an object? There’s like five ways. How do you declare a function? There are two very different ways that behave differently, and the new one has like five variations in its syntax that can throw you.
Here’s an example of something that continues to bother me:
What do you think bar looks like? If you thought it had a key of “hello” and a value of “world”, that’s sensible but wrong. It has a key of “foo”. Object keys don’t need to be quoted in JavaScript. If you want the key to be a variable you have to write it like { [foo] : “world” }. Which looks like a list.
There’s a lot of this kind of stuff in the language. Small things that once you know you can work around, but are still weird, annoying, and prone to causing errors.
The standard library historically hasn’t been very good. This has lead to many libraries being maintained by the community. But the community is fickle, and the quality of libraries is not guaranteed.
The standard library was bad at some basic operations, so underscore was created. But then someone made lodash, and most people (but not everyone!) moved to it. But then the standard library caught up some more, so maybe you don’t need either? When you start working on a new-to-you project you don’t know what you’re going to get.
Dates were a mess so momentjs got big, but now that’s deprecated. Move to datefns, which has a completely different interface.
Node releases a new major version every six months. Every six months! Python has been on major version 3 for years and has no plans for a version 4, for comparison. The constant version releases is a potential source for headaches.
In my experience many libraries are kind of fast and loose with major releases, too. It can be a pain to keep up, especially if you have peer deps.
The debugger is kind of bad. Sometimes it will pause but you typically can’t like treat it like a repl. Python’s, for comparison, blows it out of the water.
Many things are async in JavaScript. Sometimes you don’t expect a particular call to be async or you forget, and you have a bad time. The async/await keywords were a godsend. The giant stack of “then…then…then…” was not fun. Combine with the weak debugger and you have an extra bad time. I bet there are a lot of console.log(“code is here”) debug calls out in the wild because of this.
For your actual front end view layer, react is the current hotness. But older projects are still out there with angular, backbone, probably some with just jQuery. React isn’t terrible but how long is it going to be king? What breaking changes are they going to put out in the next version? The ecosystem is unstable.
Also redux kind of sucks. Not a fan of global variables. I think the community has moved on from redux though? Again, the ecosystem is unstable.
In my experience there are many developers who only know JavaScript, and they want to use it for everything. It is the dungeons and dragons of languages. Much like how it is frustrating when your friends want to run a cyberpunk murder mystery in Dungeons and Dragons, it can be frustrating when your team wants to write everything, even your backend, in JavaScript.
We had browser tests at one job. They’re a very synchronous thing. Open the browser, load the page, enter name and password, wait for login. We had all of this written in python working fine, but people wanted to switch to a JavaScript toolset. Sorry, I mean they wanted to switch to JavaScript but there were three different browser testing tools the different teams wanted to use. Because the javascript ecosystem is like that. After a more candid talk with one of the guys I knew personally, he admitted it wasn’t because JavaScript was the best tool but rather he didn’t want to use python.
I can’t authoritatively say this is typical, but in my experience I’ve had a lot of resistance from JavaScript devs using other languages. Again, I think it’s like DND. DND is a unnecessarily complicated game full of exceptions and gotchas. If that’s what you learn first, you probably think everything is like that, and why would you want to go through that again? But of the popular languages/games, javascript/DND are exceptional for their weirdness.
In fact, thinking about it for more than a minute, my current team lead is a JavaScript main and he’s great. Super willing to learn other languages and has never been pushy. So it’s definitely not everyone.
The stack traces tend to be kind of bad. In production shit is probably minified so you might get “error on line 1, column 4737373”. In other contexts you may get a few hundred lines of node_modules to sift through before finding your actual code.
At least jest and (react) testing library aren’t bad. Mocha + chai were annoying. Enzyme is not great. Again, things change rapidly. You might join a company and find they’re still using mocha and enzyme, and switching never gets prioritized. If JavaScript made things better without breaking changes or swapping to an entirely new toolset it wouldn’t be a serious problem, but the standard mode seems to be “fuck it let’s make an entirely new tool”.
The lack of type hints isn’t great. You can use typescript but that’s a whole new set of stuff you have to set up. Python also doesn’t have types but they managed to add them as an option without making us switch to like TypeThon. But that’s not the JavaScript way. If you’re not making a breaking change are you really doing JavaScript?
I could go on, but my cat is getting up to some bullshit and I need to see what he’s screaming about. Probably not JavaScript.
tldr:
standard library kind of bad
ecosystem unstable and of variable quality
unpleasant personal experiences with JavaScript developers wanting to use it for everything
Gotta say thar for someone who is currently following a JavaScript course this is pretty descouraging ahaha
I gotta say i also fell in that category of people trying to use JavaScript for stuff that is not exactly JavaScript suited. For example i’m writing a little script that changes markdown links in some files using the fs node, this is probably better suited to do in bash or other languages but the first thought was: i know a bit of JavaScript and that took a lot of time, what would be the point of learning a new syntax with all the stuff i will have to learn only on js!
If it makes you feel better, many of the things you learn in JavaScript will be helpful in other languages. You already know what functions are, for example, so you don’t need to relearn that. Even though JavaScript has some weirdness about functions.
It has a rocky start, and a lot of cruft from that era sticked around.
There are also a lot of horrible legacy projects from the pre-ES5 era which are a pain to work with. Often older projects were coded either before people knew how to do javascript right, or before the devs who wrote it knew how to write javascript right.
My problem with it is that it gives people too much freedom. They can write the code in very, VERY ugly ways… And they do. It’s a language that let’s you write a mess pretty easily.
That’s really my only complaint. The ugliness happens mainly in:
callback hell. For some reason some people still do callback hell in 2023.
functions as objects. This is pretty neat actually, one of the best things in Javascript, but some people just abuse the hell out of it.
lemmy.ml
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