Re:JavaScript web apps considered valuable
by Silhouette on Thursday January 21, 2016 @01:13PM
(#10947073)
JavaScript has grown up; it's got one of the best package managers anywhere, rapidly improving syntax and semantics, a large passionate community, loads of great tooling and a well maintained cross-platform binary in the shape of Node.
I'll give you the passionate community point. I almost completely disagree with everything else.
JavaScript is a very immature platform.
JavaScript has probably the worst packaging ecosystem of any major programming language. The fine-grained packages, indirect dependencies, and frequently broken versioning cause endless problems in real world systems. Recent attempts to fix the package manager have unfortunately swapped one set of problems for another, while still leaving some of those fundamental weaknesses involving transitive dependencies and excessive trust of version numbering conventions unaddressed.
It does has rapidly evolving syntax and semantics, but at the expense of stability, portability and future-proofing. The only reason 99% of JS programmers use most of the new syntax and semantics is a combination of a transpilation tool written primarily by one (remarkable) person and a polyfill written primarily by one other (remarkable) person in their free time. Browser, tool and Node support for many of those new features is patchy, which is why that transpilation and polyfilling is necessary.
Tooling for JS is at least two decades behind the industry best-in-class. It's a dynamic language that now has such a huge mess of build tools associated with it that seasoned veterans of web development weep at the prospect. You can't reliably debug real world JS code in its natural form, even on the level of setting break points and examining local variables and call stacks, without jumping through all kinds of hoops, and in some browsers even then. Profiling also relies almost entirely on browser magic. There are lots of testing tools, but setting them up is often a chore and they have widely varying degrees of power and flexibility. We've only recently got a style checking tool that can actually cope with ES2015 reasonably well. Refactoring, auto-completion, documentation, navigation in your editor? What are those?
As for Node... I've seen experienced developers spend months trying to get basic stuff working in a cross-platform way with Node, and then seen other experienced developers do more in a week or even a day using C. Using Node is saying "I know, let's throw out a few decades of experience building reliable client-server systems and all the other tried and tested languages and tools and libraries we've developed over that time, and instead transfer all of those negative aspects of JS to the server side as well, even though unlike front-end developers we don't have to".
I'll give you the passionate community point. I almost completely disagree with everything else.
JavaScript is a very immature platform.
JavaScript has probably the worst packaging ecosystem of any major programming language. The fine-grained packages, indirect dependencies, and frequently broken versioning cause endless problems in real world systems. Recent attempts to fix the package manager have unfortunately swapped one set of problems for another, while still leaving some of those fundamental weaknesses involving transitive dependencies and excessive trust of version numbering conventions unaddressed.
It does has rapidly evolving syntax and semantics, but at the expense of stability, portability and future-proofing. The only reason 99% of JS programmers use most of the new syntax and semantics is a combination of a transpilation tool written primarily by one (remarkable) person and a polyfill written primarily by one other (remarkable) person in their free time. Browser, tool and Node support for many of those new features is patchy, which is why that transpilation and polyfilling is necessary.
Tooling for JS is at least two decades behind the industry best-in-class. It's a dynamic language that now has such a huge mess of build tools associated with it that seasoned veterans of web development weep at the prospect. You can't reliably debug real world JS code in its natural form, even on the level of setting break points and examining local variables and call stacks, without jumping through all kinds of hoops, and in some browsers even then. Profiling also relies almost entirely on browser magic. There are lots of testing tools, but setting them up is often a chore and they have widely varying degrees of power and flexibility. We've only recently got a style checking tool that can actually cope with ES2015 reasonably well. Refactoring, auto-completion, documentation, navigation in your editor? What are those?
As for Node... I've seen experienced developers spend months trying to get basic stuff working in a cross-platform way with Node, and then seen other experienced developers do more in a week or even a day using C. Using Node is saying "I know, let's throw out a few decades of experience building reliable client-server systems and all the other tried and tested languages and tools and libraries we've developed over that time, and instead transfer all of those negative aspects of JS to the server side as well, even though unlike front-end developers we don't have to".