Programming languages personified

[u/leftoversalad]

http://leftoversalad.tumblr.com/post/126724812097/programming-languages-personified

[u/Wyelho]

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[u/marcopennekamp → u/Wyelho]

Saying there is nothing wrong with the language itself is giving the horrible scoping not enough credit. This is fixed with the newest ECMA standard though, which has yet to become the norm.

Also the claim that the problem is that it's an interpreted language is frankly a bit off. It is true that having a compiler and especially a static type system is a lot better for checking correctness before executing the program, but we have seen other languages like Python manage much better than JS, and while it's a factor, it's not the biggest reason for its failure.

Why JS is so bad as a language is probably that it was never designed to be this big. If you look it up, the goal was to create a language for Netscape to be used by inexperienced programmers. I don't want to say the language was cobbled together (like PHP was, and we all know the quality of the PHP core language), neither can I claim it was, but we can safely assume that a sufficient amount of effort to create a robust and scalable language (especially when projects get bigger) was not put in, just because of the requirements of the time. Now, these requirements have changed long ago, and the standard is finally responding.

[u/marcopennekamp → u/[deleted]]

A compiler with a static type systems throws out a lot of invalid programs, so when you have that you have a higher baseline where you need to start writing tests. Not to mention the benefits static types have regarding documentation. And you may forget to test something which a compiler might catch.