| > The biggest thing [...] is its universal nature: being able to write an application once that runs everywhere without modification. The same was said about Java, although on a slightly different axis. It never
really worked, and similarly, it doesn't work this way with JavaScript. And your point of view is very, very narrow: only web applications. There are
plenty of other applications of programming that have nothing to do with web
development, barring semi-statically displaying some results. For those
applications, JavaScript is a very bad fit. > A massive, diverse, and vibrant community. The same that produced tons of abandoned libraries, probably even more than
lay abandoned in CPAN, which is much, much older and more mature. It's not
a sign of a healthy community. Also, your glorious React didn't exist three years ago. Why should I expect it
to be still developed three years from now? It doesn't sound like a very
transferrable skill. > Getting Rid of `this' > [...] purely-functional programming is becoming more popular in JavaScript. Why not learn functional programming language for functional programming? It's
not like JavaScript could do even decently. Just throwing bunch of functions
to other functions is not quite functional programming yet; there's much more
in this paradigm. And one has to go way, way out of his way to use this
paradigm for real in JavaScript. And so on. Overall, it's better to spend time learning several different
languages of different levels and paradigms than to try to fit round peg in
a square hole with JavaScript. JavaScript should be approached only after
already learning three or four other general purpose languages (and twice as
many DSLs, like make or SQL). |
I talked about native mobile applications as well.
> Also, your glorious React didn't exist three years ago. Why should I expect it to be still developed three years from now? It doesn't sound like a very transferrable skill.
Facebook is dogfooding React in a way not seen in other libraries in use on the web. Sure, Google uses Angular here and there, but nowhere near to the extent that Facebook uses React -- both on the web and native mobile.
> Why not learn functional programming language for functional programming?
That's not really the point I was trying to make. JavaScript is already widely adopted on millions of devices. I can deploy functional JavaScript anywhere.
> And one has to go way, way out of his way to use this paradigm for real in JavaScript.
I mentioned libraries that encourage this paradigm. Including lodash-fp which makes a point of making everything in lodash auto-curried, iteratee-first, and data-last.