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by pizlonator 3783 days ago
LOL! It is expressive though. It's got really powerful first-class functions. It's got classes. It's got prototypes. It's got generators. It's got other things that I don't even remember (but will probably have to learn, to implement them, make them fast, and then fix the bugs).

I actually think that the reason why JS is so odd is that it is so expressive. That tends to happen with kitchen sink languages like C++.

Relevant: "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
2 comments
raattgift 3782 days ago
Cool. "We took a dynamic language and made it fast(er again)".

And you're gonna apply that to the darkest corners of ES6? Whee, language theory nerd paradise!

I can't wait for the compilers targeting that using all sorts of really odd idioms that in effect work like fuzz testing.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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sklogic 3783 days ago
More expressive than a less imaginative subset of C. More expressive than assembler. Much less expressive than any decent high-level language.

Javascript is low level, primitive and clumsy. There is absolutely no excuse for it being so crappy.

If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

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pcwalton 3783 days ago
> If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

Are you aware who Filip Pizlo is?

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sklogic 3783 days ago
Of course - a low level guy. It is quite likely that he is either not exposed at all to any expressive languages or reject them out of ideological reasons (JikesRVM is quite a strong symptom of the latter case).
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pcwalton 3783 days ago
I have no idea what the Jikes RVM has to do with "ideology". The point is that you're trying to tell someone who has a significant academic and industrial PL pedigree that they don't know what an expressive language is.

You seem to have an intense dislike of JavaScript. I'll the first one to admit that JavaScript has a lot of problems. But not being expressive enough is not one of them. JS is, if anything, too dynamic and expressive.

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sklogic 3783 days ago
Yes, if he thinks that JS is expressive he does not know what is expressive. And his track record clearly lacks anything related to any expressive language. I can only explain it with an ideology, because ignorance is not an option here.

And, no, JS is not expressive. It got strict limits on an available level of abstraction (unless you go into eval, of course).

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