[throwanem]

Javascript and Ruby are of an age, both first released in 1995. Javascript has always supported all of the use cases described here for Ruby, until very recently with exactly one syntactic convention for argument passing. If you want keyword arguments, pass an object; if you want to pass a function, pass a function.

That's simpler to understand because there is less to understand, with these capabilities composed from extant syntax rather than having been invented as one-offs that require being learned and understood as such, each hedged around with its own special cases and failures to generalize - if that were not the case, the article here under discussion and all others like it would never have needed writing in the first place.

I realize describing Javascript as "well designed" will be controversial, and certainly it has not been without its share of flaws: loose equality and IEEE 754 float behavior come most quickly to mind, along with the lack of a general conditional expression. I am comfortable with describing Javascript as better designed than Ruby, though. Certainly it is far more ergonomic.

Good engineering above all else is, as much as possible, simple: it can't help being about as complex as the domain it addresses, but any complication beyond that represents an error of design. Programming a general-purpose computer is an arbitrarily complex domain, which gives all the more point to the need for simplicity in design: the user of the tool has enough to think about already, and should insofar as possible not also be forced to manage unnecessary complexity in tooling. Under such a metric, that Ruby needs three kinds of calling conventions to accomplish what Javascript does with one is already enough to demonstrate that Ruby's design is lacking.

[djur]

The ergonomics of passing anonymous functions in JavaScript as originally released was awful, as was passing "keyword arguments" as objects. That's why arrow functions, async/await, and object destructuring were added to the language years later. 1995 JavaScript didn't even enforce function arity!

A language that is self-evidently superior due to simplicity and ergonomics would not inspire the publication of a hugely successful book that promises to show people the "good parts" of the language. The superior language you're describing should only _have_ "good parts".

[throwanem]

This gets us a bit into the definition of "sugar", I think. Specifically, all the constructs you mention are syntactic shorthands for the same underlying concepts, and the original syntax also remains available - which is to say, those constructs actually are syntactic sugar. Ruby having three ways, in two cases, to do one thing, is not.

I'm glad you mentioned "The Good Parts"! Crockford published in 2008 and the state of the art in JS has so evolved as to make further such work mostly unnecessary, or so I infer from its more-or-less absence over the last decade or so at least. That Ruby still requires such explainers be published in 2023 seems more an argument to my point than to yours.

You're also very anxious to make the perfect the enemy of the good here, which is a surprise after the explicit disclaimer in my prior comment. Why are you asking me to defend an argument I've been at such pains to make clear I'm not advancing?

[djur]

> the state of the art in JS has so evolved as to make further such work mostly unnecessary, or so I infer from its more-or-less absence over the last decade or so at least. That Ruby still requires such explainers be published in 2023

async/await was introduced in 2017. If you're suggesting that this required fewer "explainers" than a set of gradual changes to Ruby method call syntax, I'm afraid we're not operating under a common understanding of reality.

[lamontcg]

Kind of funny -- if I understand this correctly -- that Javascript was descended from Scheme which has delimited continuations and yet Javascript has async/await and function coloring nonsense, while ruby has continuations and fibers and doesn't need to worry about "function coloring" or "callback hell".

(Which I don't understand very well because I was a ruby programmer for 12 years, so missed all the async/await/callback-hell nonsense entirely that everyone is so obsessive about these days)

[remexre]

I don't believe Scheme as standardized has delimited continuations, only call/cc; it's just that Scheme implementations have often been the laboratories in which experiments on delimited control have been performed.

[vidarh]

Simplicity is why I detest the Javascript syntax and love the Ruby syntax. I spend far more time reading code than worrying about very simple rules for how to write the arguments, and so readability matters far more.