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It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's... (reddthat.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

I'm pretty sure most people do not like JS's loosey-goosey, who-knows-what-ur-gonna-get type system, which is why TS is so popular. Not really surprising since the bones of the language were basically spat out in a couple weeks. TS is a custom type system on top of JS, meaning it's not just JS's type system expressed through strict typing. They added a bunch of useful features like discriminated unions and so on to make using TS more pleasant than raw JS.

TS is actually usable (although NPM and the environment built around it still suck). It's inherited a bunch of weird shit from JS, but the type system generally makes them bearable.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Have you ever looked at the original JS implementation? It looks nothing like what JS is today. Saying the bones were spat out in a couple weeks is like saying Linux was developed in a few months.

    TS transpiles to JS, and any JS is valid TS. Take any TS, remove the types (and some syntactic sugar) and you have JS. I feel like if you like TS but not JS, you just don’t like loosely typed languages. That’s just a preference. It doesn’t make a language bad.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Have you ever looked at the original JS implementation? It looks nothing like what JS is today. Saying the bones were spat out in a couple weeks is like saying Linux was developed in a few months.

    And yet working groups have spent literal decades trying to make JS less shitty. The fundamental basics of JS can't be changed in backwards incompatible ways without breaking a huge number of websites. The Linux comparison is just wrong because Linux has broken backwards compatibility to fix problems. A better comparison would be Linux's policy to never break userspace. Backwards incompatible changes to JS would break a bajillion websites, much like breaking userspace would break a bajillion programs.

    TS transpiles to JS, and any JS is valid TS. Take any TS, remove the types (and some syntactic sugar) and you have JS. I feel like if you like TS but not JS, you just don’t like loosely typed languages. That’s just a preference. It doesn’t make a language bad.

    JS is valid TS. TS is not valid JS. This is the fundamental point. TS essentially fixes issues that JS cannot fix without breaking the world.

    Loose typing is fine if the language's type system isn't insane. I prefer static typing, but as long as the type system is coherent, it's not an issue.

    TBH IMO the only reason JS became popular is because it was provided by web browsers, and if you wanted to make your site do anything complex, you thus needed to use JS. This eventually led to the JS VMs being very fast, so Node was created, and now it's all over since you can learn one language for web and server.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    JS has been made less shitty. I’ll give you that old JS was pretty shitty. Like v5 and lower were a huge pain. But a lot of that was because of the lack of modern language features that other languages had at the time. ES6 introduces some huge improvements that made JavaScript much less frustrating. Personally, at this point, I have very few pain points with the language.

    I don’t think being included in browsers is the only reason JS became so popular, but it’s definitely the biggest reason. That doesn’t make it a bad language.

    Backwards incompatible changes have been introduced in JS a number of times. They are opt in at the script level and enforced in newer language contexts.

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