[acjohnson55]

I'm bracing for the downvote, but I'm going to say this anyway: are we all taking crazy pills?

I understand that we're more or less stuck with JavaScript, but this is nuts. JS has got to be one of the least intuitive, cobbled together languages I've ever had to work with. In what other language are people still having holy wars over how to separate statements?

Why the heck would a constructor be a regular function if calling it without new pollutes the global namespace? JS gives us prototypes so that we can have inheritance! Great, but that doesn't actually give us a simple ability to call super. Using functions as everything is fine and good, until you have to shoehorn all the functionality you actually need into mysterious constructs like prototype, new, and apply. When the symmetries are so half-assed, at some point, it seems to me to make way more since to stop overloading the same language construct and make separate constructs for separate uses.

And don't even get me started on implicit variable declaration, function hoisting, the double-equals, for...in, the necessity of self-calling functions, etc.

Thank God we have libraries and alternative syntaxes now that more or less smooth over these issues and coerce the programmer into writing reasonable JS code, because green field JS is a complete quagmire. Are we seriously incapable of doing better?

[wwweston]

> In what other language are people still having holy wars over how to separate statements?

Probably most of the languages in popular use. It's just that the fight is usually directed towards another language.

JS happens to be one of the minority where the standard allows some flexibility and debate about usage.

> mysterious constructs like prototype, new, and apply

They're well-defined, so they're not particularly mysterious if you take the time.

> Are we seriously incapable of doing better?

Really depends on how much effort you're willing to invest in learning JavaScript, instead of trying to write the code you're used to from $OTHER_OO_LANGUAGE. Everyone unwilling to do that is probably never going to be capable of doing better.

This isn't to say there's anything wrong with finding another familiar set of abstractions friendly or personally productive, but personally, I find greenfield JS is pretty fun, flexible, and capable.

Then again, I think the same thing about Perl (which everyone knows is one of the worst languages ever), so YMMV.

[acjohnson55]

Maybe mysterious wasn't the best choice of word, but my point is that it's quite possible for something to be well-defined and yet poorly usable.

I long since gave up on trying to write the code I'm used to in other OO languages in JS. When I'm in JS Land, I put a lot of effort into using best practices. I just find it frustrating that so many of those best practices do not at all seem to adhere to any sort of principle of least surprise. And I wouldn't say that my problem is being too tightly bound to a particular OO paradigm; I've had great fun programming in functional styles and Prolog.