Ask HN: Why do you hate JavaScript?

I've built multiple JavaScript project at scale, and I would never trust it over java or C sharp. JavaScript allows you to make way too many mistakes.

I do think Dart is the best of both worlds though. Having real types, not hacked together typescript stuff is very good. That's the other thing the nodejs ecosystem feels like a bunch of duct tape slap together again and again

A combination of:

[ ] Will probably be abandoned in less than a year

[ ] If it does not get abandoned, it will not follow semantic versioning and introduce breaking changes outside of major releases. A routine `npm upgrade` may or may not break everything

[ ] If it follows semantic versioning, there will probably be a major release with breaking changes every few months

[ ] Probably has a 500MB+ dependency tree

[ ] Frequently has security issues with a dependency 4 levels deep and you can't upgrade without conflict with another library or because a dependency 2 levels deep is abandoned

Do these issues exist in other languages? Sure but those incidents are quite rare and isolated. But these issues happen *way* too often in the JS ecosystem.

I love JS. JS and its big brother TS are my #1 choice for front end development.

What I hate about them is two things:

1. Rules for semicolons. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.

2. = and ==. Ugh. The Bug Maker.

3. + for concatenation. Yikes!

4. Arrays are objects except when they're not but objects aren't arrays. :-(

JS is essentially Lisp w/o parens. Everything is an object. Everything is by reference. And everything is mutable. Lisp is what we use on the backend and these two are kissing cousins.

  let x = 5;
  if (x=3) {
    foo();
  }

  if(3=x) {

No manual.

Java, Python, Erlang and some other languages come with detailed documentation of the language and runtime which is sufficient to use the language. You are NOT at the mercy of StackOverflow and Google SEO Spammers if you want to answer simple questions.

In Javascript they blew up the tower of babel and dispersed the manual to the 4000 corners of a hypercube.

There are ways to compensate (MDN, the official ECMA docs punch above their readership weight, ...) and I have a feeling that the frenetic progress has slowed in the last two years but I dread teaching anybody else Javascript since I can't ground it in a epistemology the way I can with Python and Java.

I rather love JS. Honestly choices of languages is pretty low on my priority list, but JS's prototypal inheritance is flexible & most of the language works well enough.

I do say though, I find the modern tool chains we have to use to effective leverage modules & use them on the web to be a bit of an abomination. There are much much better tools now, and it's a legit hard real problem, one faced by few other languages, but it has sullied what used to be an elegant & clear what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) system with something arcane & difficult.

I think people "hate" JavaScript because it's very hard to avoid it. If I don't vibe with, say, Scala, I can simply not use it. There's not a lot of situations where I'm forced to use Scala.

JavaScript is different, as it is the only language that can reliably run on modern-day browsers, which gives it a kind of reach that no other language can match. If you want to do anything interesting on the web, you have to deal with JavaScript, even if you don't like the language.

I don't hate Javascript, I actually like it for quick scripting and data-mangling. But I DO hate the never ending bits of syntax sugar added on top that I rarely actually care about. Also tired of people constantly inventing reasons to compile things INTO JavaScript (e.g. Babel, TypeScript, CoffeeScript).

After some basic things like imports and fat arrow were added, I didn’t really have much to complain about. Shitty programmers write shitty code, no language is going to solve that. If you write clear code, JavaScript is good enough if it pleases you.

Also, async/await made it tolerable for people that are not used to callback/promise chains (which is anyone that didn’t do comprehensive JavaScript before 2015). It’s like skipping the rough years, lucky y’all:

Has CLI taken on a different meaning than Command Line Interface? The primary purpose of javascript seems to be for adding code to web pages.

Javascript can't access the file system, what good would it be for most command line programs?

Python seemed like a far better choice until they abandoned 2.x because of their Unicode fetish. There are hints that 4.0 won't happen.

C, C++, C#, Java, Clojure, Rust, Pascal all seem like better ways to go for the command line.

Js was born like a shitty php-like language.

But matured and grew over most of it’s mistakes and problems.

Without typings it’s still not very scalable, but TypeScript elegantly fixed this issue.

If people hate it it’s their problem, not the language. Either they don’t really know it or they don’t really understand its area of applicability.

For most people JavaScript hate is a meme. They have either never built a bit project in it (or at least not since the language improved).

Sure it has its quirks, but with modern tooling, the idea that you can't build good software in JS is ridiculous.