Re:Rich client side web apps gone too far (2014)
by orangecat on Saturday March 28, 2015 @08:58PM
(#9283446)
Unicode support out of the box
utf16 support, which isn't the same thing: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-unicode
easy manipulation of strings, arrays, and dictionaries
JS objects aren't dictionaries; all keys are coerced to strings, they lack basic operations like getting a list of keys or values, and iterating over keys can bite you if you forget hasOwnProperty.
Python comes pretty close, with slightly wonky scoping and Unicode bolted on
And equality operators that aren't utterly insane, a usable standard library, local rather than global scope by default, classes, namespaces, modules...
ES6 does look a like a large improvement. Mainly because it fixes misfeatures and adds capabilities that better languages dealt with years ago.
Re:Rich client side web apps gone too far (2014)
by chase-seibert on Saturday March 28, 2015 @11:47PM
(#9283794)
ES6 admittedly borrowed a lot from Python. I just wish Guido had been successful getting Python supported as a first class language in Chrome; that might have actually given us a choice in the browser. Even then, I find it hard to imagine that ALL other browsers would have followed suit.
Re:Rich client side web apps gone too far (2014)
by mattdeboard on Saturday March 28, 2015 @07:28PM
(#9283194)
Garbage collection is a function of the particular runtime, no? Which probably isn't anything to do with the language... right? I'm asking sincerely, these aren't loaded questions.
Re:Rich client side web apps gone too far (2014)
by gingerrr on Monday March 30, 2015 @03:36AM
(#9288085)
while the particular effectiveness of a runtime's GC is determined by the VM, JS the language doesn't provide operators or types to represent manual memory management - so it's a pretty core feature of the language that whatever VM it runs on will use garbage collection (or at the very least transparent automatic memory management) to reclaim memory.
All languages have warts, and some are much worse than others. I actually think JavaScript's warts are fairly minor compared to C's or Python's, for example, and PHP is in a different league.
In fact, there are almost no other programming languages with JavaScript's basic features: Unicode support out of the box, proper lexical scoping with first-class function closures, high-performance garbage collection, and easy manipulation of strings, arrays, and dictionaries, for example. Python comes pretty close, with slightly wonky scoping and Unicode bolted on, but then JavaScript also has another Python doesn't, which is a spec with multiple first-class implementations, and not to mention a committee that is plotting a great path forwards into the future with fully backwards-compatible upgrades to the language.