Re:Interview with Douglas Crockford
by tombert on Tuesday July 19, 2022 @11:45AM
(#32153270)
I can't speak for Crockford obviously, but my guess is that all these extra features come at the cost of making the language "bigger". I think part of the reason people liked JS in the early days was (at least if you avoided the attempt at OOP) how simple it was. You basically only had a few core types that were flexible enough to do what you needed, you worked with simple functions that worked on those core types, and you built simple abstractions on top of that.
Obviously this can be a blessing or a curse depending on who's writing the code; it's not terribly hard to write yourself a spaghetti mess of chaos in JS. Callbacks lead to a mess of nested lambdas, promises are better but still a bit clunky, and trying to work within the "few core types" led to the famous "wat" video [1], so these things come in tradeoffs.
Still, I see where Crockford is coming from (at least if I understand his point correctly). My interview language of choice is JavaScript, and I rarely use anything introduced from 2015 or later (except the shorthand function syntax). I like that the core language has basically no bureaucracy, and you can focus on just writing code.
Obviously this can be a blessing or a curse depending on who's writing the code; it's not terribly hard to write yourself a spaghetti mess of chaos in JS. Callbacks lead to a mess of nested lambdas, promises are better but still a bit clunky, and trying to work within the "few core types" led to the famous "wat" video [1], so these things come in tradeoffs.
Still, I see where Crockford is coming from (at least if I understand his point correctly). My interview language of choice is JavaScript, and I rarely use anything introduced from 2015 or later (except the shorthand function syntax). I like that the core language has basically no bureaucracy, and you can focus on just writing code.
[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat