Switching From Flash To HTML5
Out of context: Reply #27
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- monolith0
I watched and attended Crowford's sessions. IMO there are far more negatives than positives with Javascript and why most open source powers like Mozilla and Google want it replaced with something less messy. Loose typing that's so loose that it will very easily break applications, global variables, no proper classes, hashtables, no trace of packages or name spaces. This makes a problem of every public member of every object gets exposed to every other object and can be changed where security becomes a huge problem as well.
When you read Javascript The Good Parts you can't help but facepalm yourself over and over again when Crowford himself shows some of the most idiotic problems with Javascript.
I don't disagree with you about prototypal inheritance being relatively powerful and stuff like closure which is very popular and well implemented in Javascript. But the language is a mess from any way you look at it. One or two good things vs quite a
few bad things is not what I call a good compromise. This is why by default there are so many frameworks. They are attempts to try to compensate for the inadequacies of JS as a language and are trying to mimic "proper" languages.And I completely disagree with the whole you can achieve things in Javascript that you can in OOP and not vice versa. Class-based OO can offer things like static methods, abstract classes, interfaces, method overloading and operator overloading.
For anyone who is serious, javascript is an abomination as a programming language. It was patched together for the past 15 years and it's a mess, maybe ECMAScript 6 will bring something better but Crowford is defending it because he's JS grandaddy so to speak and the guy is behind JSON. It's his life and he has a certain dose of arrogance.
I mean if Javascript was such a great language Crowford wouldn't call every other book and guides for it useless.
When someone tells you that everybody else just doesn't get it, that's a signal that there is something wrong with the language and not the world and since I'm sure you have seen Crowford's lectures and read his books the amount of absurd nonsense that happens in Javascript is what makes it an abomination and no sugar coating will change that.
The best parts of JS IMO are well implemented closure, lambdas, dynamic objects, object literals but you can count those things on one hand. There are far more bad things that makes it a bad language.
I'll just leave you with this saying from Crowford that says it all:
"JavaScript became the world’s biggest programming language completely independent of its merits". JS became popular not because it's great but because it was really the only thing that was pushed on the web and now it's so widespread that you have to deal with it's problems.