Re:How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017
by crispinb on Sunday August 27, 2017 @09:27PM
(#15113853)
> JS ecosystem has great code editors.
I'm with you on most of your points, but IDE support is still quite crude compared to (say) Java or Kotlin. Once you're fluent with these in a Jetbrains IDE it feels like you're directly manipulating an AST (or something near it) rather than 'editing text'. Javascript (even with Typescript in IDEA/Webstorm) isn't close to this yet.
Let me try to address these.
Regarding type system, lot of great languages don't have type systems either. But if there's lot of discussion on type systems, it would be because of Flow vs TypeScript.
As for static analysis, JS has seen evolution of JSHint, JSLint, JSCS, ESLint, and finally, Prettier. Flow is capable of performing type-checks with dynamic analysis.
I am not sure multi-threading is the hallmark of a modern language. Because Go, Elixir etc. are providing great concurrency without exposing threading API to the developer. JavaScript lets you do asynchronous tasks via callback, promises, generators, and latest - async/await. In the browser, you can use web-worker. But in most cases, you won't need it.
JS ecosystem has great code editors. I find VSCode to have good support out of the box, with breakpoint debugging. You can also use Atom, or Sublime Text, or Webstorm. If you're missing certain functionality, you can always add open-source plugins.