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by zeveb 3489 days ago
Has the author considered that maybe, just maybe, negativity can be justified? Sometimes when one sees people wasting yet another man-decade in yet another attempt to make JavaScript not fundamentally broken the only thing that can possibly work is to say, 'your project is stupid, because you're trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.' If reasoning doesn't work, if polite criticism doesn't work, then maybe being direct will work.

Or maybe not. I generally try to reason through this kind of thing. But after awhile one realises that if every programmer has to learn why JavaScript and single page apps are both fundamentally and accidentally broken, then thousands of years of cumulative programmer effort will be completely wasted. Maybe it'd be faster just to say, 'that's stupid: do it this way' and short-circuit the whole process. It'd be even better to say, 'that's ill-advised, here's why, and here's how to do it better.' But if the other part won't listen to the long explanation and doesn't wish to learn — then it seems to me that the last-ditch mechanism is rudeness.

1 comments

...But that's not even what he's talking about here. He's talking about people continually insulting him and his project over the internet, without even discussing the grievances they may have, legitimate though they may be.

Also, JS isn't as fundamentally broken as you think. C is far more fundamentally broken than JS, and you like C, right? I mean, I kinda like C, too. But it's broken.

> Also, JS isn't as fundamentally broken as you think. C is far more fundamentally broken than JS, and you like C, right?

Heck no! I think that the existence of C has set the fields of information technology, operating systems and computer science back by at least 50 years (yes, longer than C has existed: it's that bad).

I don't hate K&R or any of the other folks involved with C and its descendants; I don't think that they were actively malicious. But I think that their work has inadvertently made the world worse than it could have been.

Well, at least your POV is consistant. Which is more than I can say for many here.

I maintain that JS is an acceptable language despite its flaws, and that the best way to write JS is to just buck up and learn about them, rather than trying to paper them over.