Just like C: it's bad but it is the only thing that works everywhere so it's won.

Thanks for pointing this out.

I've made a respectable living off web technologies, and the products I've built create value for many people.

Maybe it's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen and I'm not Gordon Ramsay, but the final consumer product is still pretty close to being regarded as Michelin Star quality, not as a boast but just a point of fact.

Giving an flip "XYZ technology bad!" remark usually comes across as a meme or as uninformed and snobbish. The fact is these "bad" technologies do a whole lot of good.

Actually I see them as weight that prevents the industry to move forward.

Isn't C a sweet spot of portability and minimalism ? no matter the defects .. the previous qualities seemed to matter more. I mean there were attempts at replacing C but nothing came close to remove it right ?

C only got there, because UNIX just like the Browser did to JavaScript, has placed it everywhere.

This happened only because Bell Labs/AT&T were forbidden to sell UNIX, hence its source code spread across the industry, with a symbolic price that made it by comparison with other OS vendors feel almost as quite cheap beer.

During the 80's and early 90's, C only mattered in universities and companies that had access to some kind of UNIX flavour.

Everywhere else we had Assembly, Modula-2, Pascal and Basic flavours, BLISS and some PL/I variants like PL/M on CP/M.

So when you happen to have UNIX, and a C compiler around, trying to bring people to use something else, it is the same as trying to replace JavaScript on the browser.

So we come up with our CoffeScript and Typescript likes for systems programming, but C (even in C++, Objective-C) is always there.

We're all well aware of the unix/c coupling. What I'm saying is that for low level memory mangling and primitive operations over the set of register based machines.. you don't get any benefits from using another language it seems. I.. just a dude but some people doing HPC said that you can even reach FORTRAN speed on numerics if you fiddle with the right keywords to avoid aliasing.

Again I'm not a C fan.. but what would pascal or basic give you that is a critical factor in making a better system with it ? modula I can't say. Asm is too coupled to the underlying cpu it's out of the window already.

Safer with less memory corruption exploits to start with.

Fixing C is so beyond hope that Apple, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, ARM are all driving hardware based solutions for memory tagging and pointer validation, while at the same time reducing the use cases for it across their OS stacks.

> Safer with less memory corruption exploits to start with.

ok I admit defeat on this. I can't barely believe I forgot that u_u;

Here some updates on hardware memory tagging from Google regarding future Android hardware.

https://youtu.be/zkoOD4hmiGE

Microsoft, FreeBSD, ARM collaboration on CHERI

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/10/14/security-analysis...

https://youtu.be/yrk5FfjHDCo

Oracle with ADI

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E61059/gqajs.html

Apple with pointer authentication,

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preparing...

Modern JavaScript is pretty good.

And that's something a lot of JS haters have overlooked. I have purposely ignored it for the past few years and am just now getting back into it for doing CLI and back-end Node work... I find myself amazed at what's been added and improved since I was writing jQuery and AngularJS a few years back. I still have no interest in getting back into DOM work if I can avoid it but Node is kinda nice!

Don’t even tell them.

The modern JavaScript/TypeScript is so amazing and probably the best language I have used.

I have extensive programming experience in other languages like Java, Scala, Python, Ruby, C, Lisp. But JavaScript definitely wins.

i'm not a js hater but i'd be curious to hear what you think is so great about ts

It is pretty damn powerful and quite elegant. What do you find bad about it?

Not a lot is bad in the language since es6 (I don't know if they kept hoisting or not) but in any case I don't find any reason to put it that high above the rest :) but I was curious about your reasons mostly.

It's not the only thing that works everywhere anymore, other languages can be compiled to JS and WebAssembly.