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reillypascal ,

The only reason I use C++ is because that’s what all the main audio plugin tools use. It’s warty and annoying, although I’m confused why Java would rank higher

Bazz ,

So we just ignore JavaScript being on that list at sll?

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

I shit on JavaScript for years… but Deno (built around Rust) is honestly one of the most pleasant tools I’ve used for development, and you get all the completion in VS Code.

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.

BatmanAoD ,

Oh, trust me, Qt is still primarily C++. It’s effectively a massive set of C++ libraries.

aliteral ,

Couldn’t we use pure C or Pure Data with hvcc for this?

1984 ,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

C++ is… I got nothing.

sparkle ,

C++ is inferior to Rust and should be used in no new projects unless it is absolutely necessary

aliteral ,

I believe the trade-offs make Rust the best option to replace C++. Now, i’m not sure about Zig replacing C yet…

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

What is C essential for anymore these days? Genuine question btw.

I thought C++ was essential for microprocessor control, but that it depends and sometimes I gather people use C instead, but not always.

Use the language that the company hires you to know:-).

MiltownClowns ,

Used to be embedded systems mostly. Microwaves and the like. Although with the advance of the smart home I don’t know I’d that’s still true.

odium ,

The majority of microwaves, fridges, etc. Still don’t connect to WiFi. It’s mostly the high end ones which do.

whotookkarl ,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

Pretty much all of the command line coreutils programs I use daily are in C; cd, ls, pwd, touch, rm, etc. If I want to write some small utility I’ll usually reach for a scripting language first like bash python ruby etc, but if it needs to be small and fast I’ll use C instead.

BatmanAoD ,

Genuine question: if you’re writing a new CLI utility, why not Rust? This is arguably where Rust has most excelled, most famously with ripgrep.

whotookkarl ,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t have anything against Rust, I’m just not very familiar with it

Brosplosion ,

Most of the Linux kernel is written in C

Norodix ,

I do embedded. Its all C. You can’t replace it.

Shareni ,

You can’t replace it.

Zig?

tehbilly ,

Wait, that’s like C with extra fewer steps

Shareni ,

And I think they rewrote a bunch of C libraries in order to have a better cross-platform compiler for C and zig. Or something along those lines

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Or Nim?

Agrivar ,

Inertia is a mofo. I did embedded programming for industrial automation almost thirty years ago, building upon and expanding an existing nightmare of C code… and I bet there’s still some of mine running something out there to this day.

257m ,

any sort of FFI on a modern OS will need to be done through C

psycho_driver ,

The thing with C is that it’s almost always going to be the fastest high-ish level language and it has an extremely stable ABI. Self contained code written 30 years ago will likely compile with only minor (and sometimes no) tweaks today. You’re lucky to go 3 years on C++ without something fairly big breaking due to changes in the underlying language and ABI.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

That’s the kind of insight I was hoping for, thanks for sharing!

C is also just a fun language to code in. You know, aside from pointers ofc:-). Though I have never done more than dabble around personally.

BatmanAoD ,

This is a really good post about why C is so difficult to seriously consider replacing, or even to avoid by using a different language for certain projects: faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

It isn’t just a language, but it is a language - as it eventually gets around to saying, but it starts off by saying that it isn’t, then later corrects itself to say that it is, etc. I feel like the focus of this ignores the historical context of what C was written to be for - at the time there was like Assembly, BASIC, Fortran (?), other long-dead languages like was it A and/or A* or whatever, there was a B language too! (developed by Bell Labs, if Google can be trusted these days), etc. - and C was developed to be better than those. So saying that like it lacks type conversions is very much missing the point - those were not invented yet. A lawn mower also lacks those, but it’s okay bc it doesn’t need them:-) I am probably nit-picking far too many points, I suppose to illustrate that the style of the article became a hindrance to me to read it b/c of those reasons. But thank you for sharing regardless.

BatmanAoD ,

I don’t really like the title either, but the article does demonstrate how unfortunate it is that we’re effectively locked in to using the ABI at some level of nearly every piece of software.

That said, there definitely were languages with better type systems prior to the invention of C. Pascal is a frequently-cited example.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

Oh wow, good points!:-)

Semi_Hemi_Demigod ,
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world avatar

Ruby is just happy to be included

magic_lobster_party ,

Just accept it, all languages suck

asyncrosaurus ,

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

magic_lobster_party ,

That’s why Haskell is so loved. Nobody uses it.

wreel ,
@wreel@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I love how after a decade pandoc is still Haskell’s “killer app”. smh

BatmanAoD ,

I mean to be fair, that’s a pretty useful tool.

psycho_driver ,

Fortran would like a word.

sparkle ,

Not Scala and Rust. They are my beloved, my sweethearts, my knights in shining armor.

Ok Rust does have some major issues, but not Scala…

BatmanAoD ,

Oof, slow compile times to target, of all things, the JVM? Implicit methods? Some(null)? Function call syntax where the difference between a tuple argument and a sequence of non-tuple arguments can be determined by whether or not there’s a space before the parentheses?

There are definitely some major issues with Scala.

magic_lobster_party ,

They also thought the best thing to take from Python is that version 3 should not be backwards compatible with version 2

sparkle ,

I think that’s good when the objective is to improve the language. One key thing that holds many languages back is that they’re stuck with historical baggage, and it can be pretty difficult to replace/remove “outdated” stuff without breaking everything.

I do not want to be stuck using Python 2, or Scala 2 (although there exist people who use Scala 2 instead of Scala 3).

magic_lobster_party ,

Where I’m working we’re heavily using Spark, which kind of blocks us from upgrading. There seem to be ways to get Scala 3 to work, but we also have old terribly written baggage code no one understands. Just upgrading between 2.12 to 2.13 was a journey.

sparkle , (edited )

I agree that the slow compile times are pretty bad (maybe even deal-breakingly for large projects). I think it’s kind of necessary for a language with as powerful of a syntax as Scala though, it’s pretty absurd how expressive you can get. Maybe if it didn’t target the JVM, it’d be able to achieve way faster compile times – I don’t really see a point of even targeting JVM other than for library access (not to say that that isn’t a huge benefit), especially when it has relatively poor compatibility with other JVM languages and it’s nearly impossible to use for Android (don’t try this at home).

Even more so, I think that null handling isn’t nice – I wish it were more similar to Kotlin’s. One thing I’m really confused as to why Scala didn’t go all-in on is Either/Result like in Rust. Types like that exist, but Scala seems to mostly just encourages you to use exceptions for error propogation/handling rather than returning a Monad.

A more minor grudge I have is just the high-level primitive types in general – it’s pretty annoying not being able to specify unsigned integers or certain byte-width types by default, but if it really is an issue than it can be worked around. Also things like mutable pointers/references – I don’t actually know if you can do those in Scala… I’ve had many situations where it’d be useful to have such a thing. But that’s mostly because I was probably using Scala for things it’s not as cut out to do.

With the tuple arguments point, I get it but I haven’t found it much of an issue. I do wish it wasn’t that way and it consistently distinguished between a tuple and an argument list though, either that or make functions take arguments without tuples like in other functional languages or CLI languages (but that’d probably screw a lot of stuff up and make compile times even LONGER). I saw someone on r/ProgrammingLanguages a while back express how their language used commas/delimiters without any brackets to express an argument list.

I think an actually “perfect” language to me would basically just be Rust but with a bunch of the features that Scala adds – of course the significant functional aspect that Scala has (and the clearly superior lambda syntax), but also the significantly more powerful traits and OOP/OOP-like polymorphism. Scala is the only language that I can say I don’t feel anxious liberally using inheritance in, in fact I use inheritance in it constantly and I enjoy it. Scala’s “enum”/variant inheritance pattern is like Rust enums, but on crack. Obviously, Rust would never get inheritance, but I’ve found myself in multiple situations where I’m thinking “damn, it’s annoying that I have to treat <X trait> and <Y trait> as almost completely serparate”. It would especially be nice in certain situations with const generic traits that are basically variants of each other.

Plus, I’ve always personally liked function overloading and default arguments and variadics/variadic generics and stuff, but the Rust community generally seems to be against the former 2. I just really hate there being a hundred functions, all a sea of underscores and adjectives, that are basically the same thing but take different numbers of arguments or slightly different arguments.

The custom operators are a double-edged sword, I love them and always use them, but at the same time it can be unclear as to what they do without digging into documentation. I guess Haskell has a similar problem though, but I don’t think Scala allows you to specify operator precedence like Haskell does and it just relies on the first character’s precedence. I would still want them though.

How it goes now, though, is I use Scala 3 for project design/prototyping, scripting, and less performance-sensitive projects, and Rust for pretty much everything else (and anything involving graphics or web). Scala has good linear algebra tooling, but honestly I’ll usually use C++ or Python for that most of the time because they have better tooling (and possibly better performance). I would say R too, but matplotlib has completely replaced it for literally everything regarding math for me.

BatmanAoD ,

Sounds like we’re actually in agreement about most of this.

I’m okay with languages limiting their “expressive” power in order to provide stronger correctness guarantees or just limit how “weird” code looks; but this is largely because I’ve worked on many projects where someone had written a heap of difficult-to-understand code, and I doubt such limitations would be appealing if I were working strictly on my own.

I also don’t really see the appeal of Java-style inheritance, but to be honest I didn’t use Scala for long enough to know whether or not I agree that Scala does inheritance “right”.

It does make sense that Rust provides mutability in some cases where Scala doesn’t. Rust’s superpower, enabled by the borrow checker, is effectively “safe mutability.” I hope other, simpler languages build on this invention.

lseif ,

not zig

Hotzilla ,

Yes, just flip binary directly to the cpu

DacoTaco ,
@DacoTaco@lemmy.world avatar

Writing raw byte binaries ftw!

(Jokes aside, all programming languages have their good and bad things. Some just have more bad than good. And i say that as a C/C#/typescript/asm developer :p

onlinepersona ,

C++ is a surprise CVE generator.

Anti Commercial-AI license

BrokenGlepnir ,

There was an adjective for C++. It’s just the pointer was dropped.

DarkCloud ,

C++ is focused on getting a strong degree of root control over the hardware of lots of systems. Which is part of why it’s difficult.

marcos ,

Sorry, Undefined Behavior Everywhere was yelling way too loud to hear you clearly.

Were you talking about strong controlling anything with C++?

BatmanAoD ,

I mean, if you’re talking about CVEs permitting attackers to get control of the hardware of lots of systems, then yes, I agree

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Only a part. A lot of the complexity is completely unnecessary.

downpunxx ,

C++ catchin strays

noproblemmy ,

C pew pew

luciole ,
@luciole@beehaw.org avatar
  • C++ is fine
  • Python is fine
  • C# is fine
  • PHP is fine
  • JavaScript is fine
  • C is fine
  • Java is fine

I could go on

SeekPie ,

Go on…

passepartout ,

Don’t give them ideas

SquishyPandaDev ,
@SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net avatar

A true programmer

polonius-rex ,

PHP is fine

i will fine you

CanadaPlus ,

JavaScript is also not fine.

C++ apparently has a lot of footguns if you use too many parts of it. C and orthodox C++ are fine.

polonius-rex ,

people say this but C is significantly more batshit than javascript

oh you used scanf? one of the basic functions of our language? sorry that's got a buffer overflow vulnerability so now your application is compromised

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yeah, but as far as I understand that’s not a C vulnerability. It wasn’t added. C just exposes how the underlying CPU works.

If you could avoid exposing dangerous memory quirks but still retain the same power… well, you’d have invented Rust. Rust is a better language than C, I agree with that.

Edit: Yep, just double checked. Buffers live in physical memory and have to be finite, so if you advance outside of them you’ll go somewhere else. Scanf’s not special, this is just another inherent pointer issue.

polonius-rex ,

exposing the machinations of the underlying CPU with no regard for safety is like, the definition of a footgun

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Okay, but how do you code on a CPU without directly interfacing the CPU at some point? Python and JavaScript both rely on things written in mid-level languages. There’s a difference between a bad tool and one that just has limitations inherent to the technology.

Like, to echo the meme a bit, it’s not a totally straight comparison. They have different roles.

polonius-rex ,

a footgun isn't inherently bad, it just implies a significant amount of risk

yes, if you need the ability to code on a low level, maybe C is necessary, but the times where that is actually necessary is smol

also rust

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yes, also Rust. It wasn’t an option until recently though.

The times when C or C++ is worth it definitely isn’t always, but I’m not sure I’d class much of OS programming and all embedded and high-performance computing as small. If you have actual hard data about how big those applications are relative to others, I’d be interested.

Also, it’s a nitpick, but I’d personally say a footgun has to be unforeseeable, like literal shoe guns being added to a video game where guns were previously always visible. Once you understand pointers C is reasonably consistent, just hard and human-error-prone. The quirks follow from the general concepts the language is built on.

polonius-rex ,

Once you understand pointers

once you understand C++ the pitfalls of C++ are reasonably consistent

I'm not sure I'd class much of OS programming and all embedded and high-performance computing as small

there are like what, 3 operating systems these days?

assume those are all written entirely in c and combine them and compare that to all code ever written

CanadaPlus ,

once you understand C++ the pitfalls of C++ are reasonably consistent

All of C++? That’s unreasonable, it’s even in the name that it’s very expansive. Yes, if you already know a thing, you won’t be surprised by it, that’s a tautology.

C is more than just pointers, obviously, but the vast majority of the difficulty there is pointers.

there are like what, 3 operating systems these days? assume those are all written entirely in c and combine them and compare that to all code ever written

Plus all previous operating systems, all supercomputer climate, physics and other science simulations, all the toaster and car and so on chips using bespoke operating systems because Linux won’t fit, every computer solving practical engineering or logistics problems numerically, renderers…

Basically, if your computational resources don’t vastly exceed the task to be done, C, Rust and friends are a good choice. If they do use whatever is easy to not fuck up, so maybe Python or Haskell.

polonius-rex ,

All of C++? That's unreasonable, it's even in the name that it's very expansive.

similarly, "all of pointers" is unreasonable

"all of pointers" can have a lot of unexpected results

that's literally why java exists as a language, and is so popular

Plus all previous operating systems, all supercomputer climate, physics and other science simulations, all the toaster and car and so on chips using bespoke operating systems because Linux won't fit, every computer solving practical engineering or logistics problems numerically, renderers...

sure, and the quantity of code where true low-level access is actually required is still absolutely minuscule compared to that where it isn't

CanadaPlus ,

similarly, “all of pointers” is unreasonable

“all of pointers” can have a lot of unexpected results

How? They go where they point, or to NULL, and can be moved by arithmetic. If you move them where they shouldn’t go, bad things happen. If you deference NULL, bad things happen. That’s it.

sure, and the quantity of code where true low-level access is actually required is still absolutely minuscule compared to that where it isn’t

If you need to address physical memory or something, that’s a small subset of this for sure. It also just lacks the overhead other languages introduce, though. Climate simulations could be in Java or Haskell, but usually aren’t AFIAK.

polonius-rex ,

How? They go where they point, or to NULL, and can be moved by arithmetic. If you move them where they shouldn't go, bad things happen. If you deference NULL, bad things happen. That's it.

what part of that is explicit to how scanf works?

CanadaPlus ,

I suppose if you treat scanf as a blackbox, then yeah, that would be confusing. If you know that it’s copying information into the buffer you gave it, obviously you cant fit more data into it than it’s sized for, and so the pointer must be wandering out of range.

Maybe C would be better without stdlib, in that sense. Like, obviously it would be harder to use, but you couldn’t possibly be surprised by a library function’s lack of safeness if there were none.

polonius-rex ,

yeah i mean if you grok the underlying workings of scanf then there's no problem

i'd just argue that the problem is understanding what you need to understand is the problem with straight c, and with any language like c++ where you're liable to shoot thineself in thy foot

CanadaPlus ,

I’m wondering now how much you could add without introducing any footguns. I’d guess quite a bit, but I can’t really prove it. Smart pointers, at least, seem like the kind of thing that inevitably will have a catch, but you could read in and process text from a file more safely than that, just by implementing some kind of error handling.

BatmanAoD ,

There were memory-safe languages long before C was invented, though; C was widely considered “dangerous” even at the time.

CanadaPlus ,

True, but AFAIK they all sucked really bad. If you needed to make something that preformed back then you wrote in assembly.

FORTRAN might be a good counterexample. It’s pretty fast, and I’m not actually sure if it’s memory safe; it might be. But, it’s definitely very painful to work with, having had the displeasure.

BatmanAoD ,

True, but AFAIK they all sucked really bad.

That’s pure assumption and, as far as I can tell, not actually true. PASCAL was a strong contender. No language was competitive with handwritten assembly for several decades after C’s invention, and there’s no fundamental reason why PASCAL couldn’t benefit from intense compiler optimizations just as C has.

Here are some papers from before C “won”, a more recent article about how PASCAL “lost”, and a forum thread about what using PASCAL was actually like. None of them indicate a strong performance advantage for C.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Hmm, that’s really interesting. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.

One thing you might not know is that the Soviets had their own, actually older version of C, the Адресный programming language, which also had pointers and higher-order pointers, and probably was memory-unsafe as a result (though even with some Russian, I can’t find anything conclusive). The thing I eventually ran into is that Pascal itself has pointer arithmetic, and so is vulnerable to the same kinds of errors. Maybe it was better than C, which is fascinating, but not that much better.

Off-topic, that Springer paper was also pretty neat, just because it sheds light on how people thought about programming in 1979. For example:

In the following, we shall

  1. compare how “convenient” the languages are to code our favourite solution to a programming problem,
  2. play the devil’s advocate, and try to list all possible things that can go wrong in a program expressed in a language.

Some of us, including myself, have reservations about the validity of the second technique for comparison, the most persuasive argument being that even though some of the features are potentially dangerous, people rarely use them in those contexts. There is certainly some truth in this, but until we have experimentally collected data convincingly demonstrating this, it is wiser to disbelieve it. Take note of the observed fact of increased difficulty in formally proving the properties of programs that use these potentially hazardous features in a safe way. This is one of the reasons behind the increased redundancy (and restrictions) of the newer languages like Alphard

I don’t see a lot of people denying that 2 is a good metric today. In fact, in the rare exceptions where someone has come right out and said it, I’ve suspected JS Stockholm syndrome was involved. Murphy’s law is very real when you not only have to write code, but debug and maintain it for decades as a large team, possibly with significant turnover. Early on they were still innocent of that, and so this almost reads like something a non-CS acedemic would write about programming.

BatmanAoD ,

Indeed, I had no idea there are multiple languages referred to as “APL”.

I feel like most people defending C++ resort to “people shouldn’t use those features that way”. 😅

As far as I can tell, pointer arithmetic was not originally part of PASCAL; it’s just included as an extension in many implementations, but not all. Delphi, the most common modern dialect, only has optional pointer arithmetic, and only in certain regions of the code, kind of like unsafe in Rust. There are also optional bounds checks in many (possibly most) dialects. And in any case, there are other ways in which C is unsafe.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

I feel like most people defending C++ resort to “people shouldn’t use those features that way”. 😅

And yeah, I’m with you, that’s a shit argument. A language is a tool, it exists to make the task easier. If it makes it harder by leading you into situations that introduce subtle bugs, that’s not a good tool. Or at least, worse than an otherwise similar one that wouldn’t.

Without a super-detailed knowledge of the history and the alternative languages to go off of, my suspicion is that being unsafe is intrinsic to making a powerful mid-level language. Rust itself doesn’t solve the problem exactly, but does control flow analysis to prove memory safety in (restricted cases of) an otherwise unsafe situation. Every other language I’m aware of either has some form of a garbage collector at runtime or potential memory issues.

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

What’s the point of having a function in the standard library if the universal recommendation is to never use it?

CanadaPlus ,

Is that the recommendation? This is the first time I’ve actually seen it discussed.

I’m wondering at this point if a new, different stdlib would be better. Or just use Rust.

xigoi ,
@xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

To be honest, my comment probably applies more to gets, but the point is the same.

AllNewTypeFace ,
@AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space avatar

Are those adjectives randomly chosen?

odium ,

Yeah, JavaScript powerful? How?

AceSLS ,

By running everthing in a single thread obviously. Won’t get more powerful than that

polonius-rex ,

good luck doing frontend development without it, but it can also do backend development

it can do everything

RoyaltyInTraining ,
@RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world avatar

The thing it can do best is bewilder developers with it’s strange choices

polonius-rex ,

i wouldn't want to program in pure assembly either but asm is definitely powerful

wreel ,
@wreel@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I would argue that ASM isn’t “powerful”. It’s direct. You can access advanced features of a CPUs architecture with the trade off limited portability. Sometimes it’s necessary but power comes from being able to express complex control and data structures in a concise and readable amount of text.

The subjective topic of what “concise and readable” means is where the language wars come in.

odium ,

That makes it versatile, not powerful.

When I hear powerful language, I think of languages that are good at intensive tasks like assembly, c, rust, Python (because of numpy, pandas, pyspark, cuda, etc.).

echindod ,

Python is powerful because it easily wraps C libraries that do real work! Just kidding mostly.

But yeah, js isn’t a language I would describe as powerful. Ubiquitous? More capable than you would expect given it’s history? Bloated?

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Python is powerful because it easily wraps C libraries that do real work! Just kidding mostly.

Not kidding. There’s no rule against that though. It’s good at it’s niche.

9point6 ,

Does that not put JS (node) back on the table?

I’d say it’s the low level language doing the heavy lifting, python or JS in this scenario are just front-ends.

Hell, I think FORTH has C bindings, that’s not power, that’s mental illness

CanadaPlus ,

Sure, but there are good and bad frontends. JavaScript has a tendency to silently fly off the handle in mysterious ways due to the crazy type system. Python will typically fail more predictably, and is famously easy to write. I know nothing about FORTH, honestly.

odium ,

Dw, no one does.

frezik ,

I exercised JavaScript out of some of my apps, and I’m happier for it.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Did they get a good workout?

CanadaPlus ,

but it can also do backend development

The same way a rusty spoon can dig a hole, sure.

lseif ,

if its acceptable to force javascript onto the backend and everywhere else, then why not write the frontend in rust, or anything else than can compile to wasm ?

BatmanAoD ,

WASM has no native ability to access most web APIs, including the DOM. JavaScript is literally unavoidable on the front end.

lseif ,

javascript cannot be compiled natively for the backend or desktop either…

also libraries like wasm bindgen allow a developer to write almost no javascript. and i wouldnt could a few lines of bootstrapping.

im dont advocate for wasm when its not necessary. nor do i advocate for backend js when its not necessary.

BatmanAoD ,

Sorry, I’m not sure what your point is. I realize that you can almost completely avoid JavaScript, but the point I’m making is merely that there is a real technical limitation that limits the choices developers can make for front-end code, and although WASM is making great strides in breaking down that barrier (something I’ve been thrilled to see happen, but which is going much more slowly than I had hoped), the limitation is still there. Conversely, such a barrier has never existed on the backend, except in the sense that C limits what all other languages can do.

lseif ,

my point is that languages have their places.

javascript is great for the frontend. not just because it’s the only choice, but it’s also a lot easier to write code for ui than say, C or rust.

however i do not see a reason why it needs to run on servers or desktop apps, bar a few cases. i know node is popular, but i think fullstack devs just like to have everything in the same language, even if it makes it harder to use and slower to run.

likewise C, rust, go, whatever, are great for backends, embedded etc, but they shouldnt be ran on in the browser, unless there is a specific reason like heavy computation with little dom interaction.

just because a barrier does not exist doesnt mean that we should write programs in a language not designed for the domain.

BatmanAoD ,

I’m honestly not convinced JavaScript is good even for the front-end, because it’s intentionally designed to swallow, ignore, and otherwise minimize errors; which is not helpful at all for development of any software. My point is that the only reason JavaScript is dominant in front-end development is that, prior to WASM, it was literally the only option; if that hadn’t been the case, I doubt it would have become nearly so widely used.

lseif ,

i actually agree, but i think its more the issue that modern websites are designed like desktop apps. having a weakly typed and flexible langauage like js is fine when youre only adding a little interactivity to an otherwise mostly functional website.

9point6 ,

IIRC JavaScript + TypeScript is the biggest demographic of engineers in the industry if you go by GitHub stats

I suppose you could call that power in a way

CanadaPlus ,

JavaScript is AN UNAVOIDABLE HARDSHIP

marcos ,

Pretty much so.

SatouKazuma ,

Mfw Rustaceans don’t exist :(

Also, JavaScript…why are you the way you are? Does anyone have advice for learning it so it makes sense? I can’t even get tutorial projects to run properly…

davidgro ,

This meme is older than rust.

polonius-rex ,

actually it says 8h meaning it's only 8 hours old

CanadaPlus ,

It will be 8 hours old forever.

southernwolf ,
@southernwolf@pawb.social avatar

Forever young…

polonius-rex ,

use typescript and don't look too hard at the infrastructure

frezik ,

I tried, but the infrastructure collapsed on me.

dis_honestfamiliar ,

Lol any

activ8r ,

Last company I worked at used Typescript, but used any for everything… I have no idea why. I never got an actual answer.

MostlyBlindGamer ,
@MostlyBlindGamer@rblind.com avatar

Because they didn’t want to train their JS developers and didn’t want to cause friction for new projects. They get to say they’re using TS, with basically none of the real advantages. (Apart from general rational error checking.)

MajorHavoc ,

The mantra that got me through JavaScript was “almost nothing we do here is able to be synchronous”.

Everything about the language makes more sense, with that context.

marcos ,

Start simple.

And that probably requires not going with a tutorial. Because the JS ecosystem scorns at “simple”. Just make some HTML scaffold and use MDN to understand the DOM.

magic_lobster_party ,

I like Douglas Crockford’s talks about the “good parts” of JavaScript. They’re old and probably a bit outdated, but he explain quite well the history and why JavaScript is the way like it is.

It clicked for me when I saw them the first time. Still hate JavaScript though.

wreel ,
@wreel@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

What Crockford did was enable a lot of devs to realize there was a viable development platform built into the most prolific and open network client in the world. For that he should be commended but it should have never been taken as “this is a viable general purpose language”.

magic_lobster_party ,

He also showed that JavaScript has more resemblance to functional programming languages rather than object oriented ones. If you try to treat it as an object oriented language like Java (like the seem to imply), you will have a bad time.

This has changed with TypeScript though.

repungnant_canary ,

Can it even make sense tho? To me JS is an example of a not too good thing that people started too eagerly so now they’re trying to make it make sense.

SatouKazuma ,

I have no idea.

chraebsli OP ,
@chraebsli@programming.dev avatar
  • PHP is old
  • HTML is NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE!!!
  • CSS is
    ︎ ︎ ︎ not alig-

︎ ︎ ︎ ned

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

PHP is old

Same age as Ruby, Java and JavaScript, but younger than Python, C, and C++. 😛

Guydht ,

I’m guessing they meant “old” as in “no one uses it anymore, it’s dead”

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

Don’t tell my bosses that. Or the PHP community as a whole for that matter. Then I might have to get a real job.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

I’m sorry. If you exclude the millions of sites using it, it is virtually unused.

asyncrosaurus ,

Meanwhile PHP quietly runs 80% of the internet by being used for WordPress.

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

The year they both came out (1995) I was coding in Visual Basic 3. Ack.

DacoTaco ,
@DacoTaco@lemmy.world avatar

Modern php is not bad actually. Still kinda slow and dangerous, but A LOT better than it used to be :')
That said, i wouldnt build a web service with php still lol

chraebsli OP ,
@chraebsli@programming.dev avatar

Actual definitions (my opinion):

  • HTML is website
  • CSS is style
  • JS is everywhere
  • SQL is data
  • Python is simple
  • PHP is backend
  • Markdown is README
  • YAML is config
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