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A comment on JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop. Parent comment

Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by gaius on Monday September 12, 2016 @03:43PM (#12483000)
You are forgetting that even Eich didn't want to do JS; he wanted to embed Scheme but was overruled by suits at Netscape who wanted to ride the Java hype. That's why the semicolons and curly braces. It really is indefensible on technical grounds.
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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by goatlover on Monday September 12, 2016 @03:50PM (#12483062)
I think they also told him to make it forgiving, like html, so that beginners could use it. Thus the implicit conversion rules, optional semicolons, being able to leave new off a function constructor, not having to use var, and so forth.
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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by douche on Monday September 12, 2016 @04:54PM (#12483583)
It's too bad nobody pumped the brakes after it was a little successful, and said "Okay guys, let's stop dicking around and do this right now, before we have to deal with it for the next 30 years". Alas...
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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by qwer on Monday September 12, 2016 @04:29PM (#12483347)
These laundry lists of js warts get dragged out continually, so I really have to ask: How are you people actually developing in javascript and haven't yet discovered linters?

Linters have been around for over a decade and solve all of these issues (as they do in other languages as well). They're also easily integrated in every text editor and build system I've ever seen.

And why shouldn't the interpreter support these rules? Because a linter can do this almost as easily, and not break backward compatibility.

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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by goatlover on Monday September 12, 2016 @06:47PM (#12484303)
The same can be said for C's flaws. Just use a linter.

That didn't stop people from wanting to come up with or use different languages in place of C, where possible.

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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by flukus on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:05AM (#12494908)
What state was guile in at the time? Could we have ended up with that instead of javascript?
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