[agumonkey]

Completely logical. Java, C, PHP are said to be algol descendants. In two words: curly braces. JS wasn't supposed to but ended up curly because social trends are that strong. Now imagine JS function being the only thing you use, then that language users and designers evolving a syntax for typed js-like functions, rince repeat, you get ML, Haskell, Elm.

In time your brain realigns, depending on how much you appreciate the functional style or not.

[striking]

Not quite. ALGOL doesn't have curly braces, just BEGIN and END blocks.

  BEGIN
  FILE F (KIND=REMOTE);
  EBCDIC ARRAY E [0:11];
  REPLACE E BY "HELLO WORLD!";
  WHILE TRUE DO
    BEGIN
    WRITE (F, *, E);
    END;
  END.

I've heard it said that the languages you mentioned are inspired by C's syntax.

[agumonkey]

Wow, couldn't be more wrong. It's indeed C family (BCPL, B). Thanks a lot for the note.

[mikekchar]

Well, I wouldn't be so hard on yourself. IIRC (and I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong), algol introduced block scoping. Whether you use BEGIN/END or {/} I think is a pretty minor point.

C has braces to introduce a new scope. The irony is that JS (until recently) didn't have block scope. It just has braces :-).

Now this is where it gets screwy. You are supposed to (but don't have to usually) add a semi-colon on the end of each statement in Javascript.

a = 52;

This has a semi colon because it is a statement. There is another construct called an expression. An expression is anything that can evaluate to a value. An statement can be an expression (the statement "a = 52;" is an example of that because it also evaluates to 52 and is thus an expression). But there are expressions that are not statements. Here is an example of an expression

(5 * 27)

It evaluates to a value, but doesn't do anything so it is not a statement. Usually in computer languages, if "statements" are actually expressions. So you can say

if (1>0) {"Yay"} else {"Boo"}

evaluates to a value ("Yay" in this case), but doesn't do anything in and of itself. The blocks in the braces may contain statements, but the if is an expression, not a statement. Note the lack of semi-colon. Again, presumably because it is an expression, not a statement.

You can try the above in Node and it will indeed return the value "Yay".

a = if(1>0) {"Yay"} else {"Nay"};

In this case the variable a should be assigned the value "Yay", because the if expression evaluates to a "Yay". For some strange reason (that I don't understand), Javascript (or at least Node, when I tried it) does not accept that. It gives you a syntax error. You can not use if "statements" as expressions in Javascript (which sucks quite a bit).

All of this to say that Javascript appears broken to me, no matter what geneology you assign to it :-D. I personally really like programming in JS (or actually CS), but it is a beast unto itself, I think.

I'd welcome comments illuminating this issue if I've made a mistake with the above! As I said, it's easy to do.

[agumonkey]

True but my algol mention was strongly on syntax not semantics (big part of algol contribution).

[fnovd]

>You can not use if "statements" as expressions in Javascript (which sucks quite a bit).

It does indeed, and it leads to some ugly code:

a = function() { if(1>0) { return "Yay" } else { return "Nay" } }()

[ziad-saab]

You can also write:

a = 1 > 0 ? "Yay" : "Nay"