No offence
C is the sniper you don’t see
And just like in Metal Gear, he dies of old age if you wait a bit.
C is old, ubiquitous and still does not have a good replacement for its low-level cross-platform usecases, so I’ll believe it when I see it 😄
Rust is doing a very decent job of low-level cross platform. C just has a very long history.
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!
Rust won’t replace c.
The programs are too bloated for many embedded systems where every byte counts because it’s in ROM or loaded jnto IRAM
All that memory safety and garbage collection, for example, comes at a big cost
garbage collection
I don’t think Rust has a garbage collector.
Rust actually doesn’t have a garbage collector! The point of Rust is that memory safety is statically verified at compile time, automatically inserting allocations and frees. The bloat of Rust binaries in my experience comes from excessive code generation such as generics or macros. If you’re aware of that, though, you can avoid the more bloaty bits (such as the string formatting machinery) and compile some quite tiny binaries. For example, I was able to write a simple GameBoy Advance game that only took 2kb of ROM including the assets.
That said, C still very much has its place, but Rust can definitely do embedded.
At the same time, C is the only stable ABI available for Rust.
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.
C is back at HQ with 2 Stars and enough political capital to serve till they die.
C or c++ should be the one in the back, pointing at things…
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?
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.
One that comes into my mind is ABAP:
that’s a crime against humanity
Oh boy…
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.
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
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:
const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world"}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’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.
Python programmers, brace yourself for this…
Oh wait.
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.
>>> "3" + 9 Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to strYou 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.>>> "A" * 4 + "H" 'AAAAH'I meant that you do not declare types and a variable’s type can change at any time.
Regardless of semantics, it results in code that is not scannable.
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).
- What lol, python has type hints (ie gradual typing)
- Python is absolutly not popular at all in academics lol, most over there use haskell/ocaml/c
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.
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.
Let me suggest a simple exercise for you.
- Print “Hello world!” to stdout in Javascript.
- Show me the standard that guarantees that everything you’ve used exists and works as intended.
I’ll wait.
Show me the standard that guarantees that everything you’ve used exists and works as intended. I’ll wait.
I think you fail to understand the very basics of web development if you’re operating on the assumption that everything you need is always reachable.
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.
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.
-
ah yes programming languages are jokes themselves, and not the programmers using the wrong tools for the wrong job
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’ve commented to my cow-orkers that “Typescript is the bag they put over Javascript’s face so you don’t have to look at it anymore.”
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”.
It was when better sandboxing came out and the only valid complaints about javascript became invalid.
I was there. It was a good time.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) English1•1 year ago
XMLHttpRequest
Probably when V8 came out. Also Node.js.
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).
Thank you, that was an interesting read!
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) English1•1 year ago
XMLHttpRequest
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?
Ahh I remember that sort of JS programming from way back. Do people still do that?? You can just create a class now
“You guys are stupid. See, they’re gonna be lookin’ for army guys.”
Is python really any better?
Python is as inefficient as js is ugly
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 6•1 year ago
Well done.
That is like a colleague farewell card that says, “Four years already? It seems like only six months with all that we have accomplished.”
Afaik JavaScript only runs in a browser. If you want to make a desktop app your only option is something like electron.
For example, you can’t make the equivalent of a bash script with JS, but it’s trivial with python. I don’t think you can do system calls at all with JS.
There are non-browser JavaScript implementations, the most well-known of which is node.js
python in the same league as cpp, rust and c# is the real joke
Pfhhh what?
it is a horribly slow, ugly language, with the most braindead scoping rules (apart from js, of course). The only fast parts of it are libraries written in other languages, because python itself is not up to the task for anything more than glueing code from other, better languages together.
Honestly JS seams saner then python, it’s wierd but rather sane. The only really bad parts of JS are the type coercing == and =! operators which are very broken
For example “” == 0 and 0 == “0” are both true, but “0” == “” is false.
this is an unpopular opinion of mine, but I think lua is, in turn, a saner version of js. Apart from the 1-based indexing (which really isn’t that big a deal imo). But I really love the stackful coroutines.
I haven’t worked with any 1-based indexing languages, but I can’t really see how it could be problematic. The only advantage I see about 0-based indexing is the simplicity in how the memory address is calculated. Just
arr + index × sizeof(member)which I think even has its own MOV instruction on x86. But besides that I can’t see any more advantages. With 1-based indexing I see the advantage of the number of elements also being the index of the last element of the array, avoiding off-by-one errors when writing. Though, again, I’ve never used a 1-based indexing language.
Ok, admittedly I was using typescript but honestly, I really enjoyed using JavaScript. I kinda feel like people who shit on it have never used it much, or aren’t very experienced, or it just wasn’t to their taste and they’re jumping on the hate train that the others like to conduct.
(I also understand this is a joke dw)
My feelings toward JavaScript depend on the context in which I’m using it. I really like JavaScript in a React app or Next.js, but I don’t care for it in Views and Razor page in .NET web applications, though it’s getting better.
I kinda feel like people who shit on it have never used it much, or aren’t very experienced
How much experience do you have? (and don’t even think about lying; this is the internet)
Definitely 2023 years worth of experience. I taught Jesus himself JS. Which, fun fact, doesn’t stand for JavaScript, but stands for JesusScript. I would never lie on the internet.
(4ish years lmao)
4 years isn’t enough to hate javascript. Either those 4 years are entirely in JS, in which case it’s all you know and thus you lack perspective. OR, you spent e.g. 2 years with a different language and only 2 in JS, in which case you don’t have enough experience with JS to have an informed opinion.
Don’t worry though, we all started our JS hating journey like that. Give it a few more years and I promise you’ll be able to hate javascript like the masters.
I never said I had a total of 4 years experience, only that I had 4 years of JS experience.
But yes, I will work on honing my hatred. I hope to one day gain a seat at the JSith council and achieve the rank of master.
Let your anger flow through you.
10ish years here, I don’t hate js. The more modern tools, frameworks and typescript makes it awesome to use for frontend stuff.
It’s probably also related to when a person first encountered JS. If you learned it pre-2015—even if you’re aware of the changes made in ES6—I can see how it would be hard not to view JS as cumbersome. I personally love to use it, but I can’t imagine that would be true without
let,const, classes, etc.Edit also block scoping and arrow functions!
- Rikudou_Sage ( @rikudou@lemmings.world ) 14•1 year ago
Yeah, gonna have to disagree. If I had to choose between JS and Python, I’d shoot myself in the head.
- Llewellyn ( @Llewellyn@lemmy.ml ) 9•1 year ago
So you choose JS.
Python is cool IMO, got loads of libraries and gets your little app up in notime.
Not for larger projects though.
JavaScript is like the unsafest language I have touched in the last 20 years, yikes!
Still would use it as a web front end instead of python ofc.
Well, it’s not like you have any option. Browsers only run Javascript, right?
Well you can do it the ‘old’ way serving front (pages) from the back like PHP did it.
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.
What languages did you use 2 decades before?
What languages did you use 2 decades before?
Turbo Pascal, Go, assembler and Basic I guess :-D
Python is rather the clown. As it is more Scratch than a programming language
Python?
Im just over here in the corner trying to learn Java.
peaks through the cheap stand-up office blinders from the C# “office” Can you help me debug something rq?
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 6•1 year ago
PHP is the landmine they are about to step on.
Glad C++ will be the one step on it cause it deserves it. I’d take PHP over that shit any day
Every few years I go back to giving JS a chance and every time I’m left frustrated. At least it’s not as bad as it was a decade ago I guess
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.
And I’m the smalltalk soldier in my rainbow uni 🌈
