A lot of the jokes about JavaScript being messy come from historical quirks—like loose equality, type coercion oddities, or the way `this` behaves—but the ECMAScript specification has been steadily improved over the years by ECMA TC39 (the committee responsible for developing the standard).

Likewise PHP has been somewhat inconsistent historically and carries its own legacy quirks—but it's JS that gets mocked, because why?

Meanwhile Java—although designed with a cohesive strict, statically typed, object-oriented sensibility—has seen fit to add lambda expressions, stream APIs, record types, and pattern matching, following some of the same trends as ECMA TC39.

So, when it comes to developer ergonomics—which, I daresay, is the subject of this satire and the preeminent aspect of a language most hotly debated—does JS really deserve the hate? There must be some other current of thought—some dark matter—warping the discourse.

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edem 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You don't have to use PHP so there is no reason to mock it. You just know it is shit and you move on. Unfortunately you __have to__ use javascript sometimes (or always) so there is reason to mock it. That's the reason why people always mock JS. It is omnipresent and you have to touch it with your bare hands.

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hoppp 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yup, Js can't be avoided. I was just doing a desktop app in golang.. and the best way to have cross platform ui? Webview. I tried all the frameworks in go and nothing comes close. I could choose another language to write my business logic in and not go but still, it probably ends up using a webview for the UI.

Its not even heavy anymore because its just the OS native webview, unlike electron, it doesn't bundle a browser so the base app is just 3.3MB, while if I use GPU to render the Ui the app I ship starts at 60MB

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MaulingMonkey 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And to back up your point: Whenever someone in my circle does have to use PHP (job, legacy nonsense, etc.) they absolutely do mock it. They also mock the codebase they work on for similar reasons. Part venting, part communication of the footguns - such that others might learn from what they had to learn the hard way, and perhaps part bribe - that others might share their own footguns in commiseration and trade.

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userbinator 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You always have to mock if you want to do extremely localised unit testing.

(Sorry, could not resist...)

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archerx 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m sorry but Personal Home Page is not shit. It’s quite nice, it’s like using a comfy version of C designed for the web.

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dahart 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Personal Home Page is crappier than PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. :P Reputations take a long time to fix, and PHP earned a bad rep for its security problems around ~2006. It’s also a language that doesn’t worry about being pure and covering every minor conceivable inconsistency that never comes up in practice like the rabbit holes some other languages go down. PHP is more focused on just getting things done, so don’t take the mockery personally, in a way it’s a compliment.

	▲	archerx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It will always be Personal Home Page to me. Those lame open source names that have the acronym in the name are 1000000% more cringe. I agree with you about the rest :)

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edem 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can have your opinion of course but rhe majority disagrees.

	▲	archerx 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Doesn’t mean that they are right.

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archerx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

PHP has been relentlessly mocked for the past decade, there were websites dedicated to making fun of its quirks. Things only started turning around after PHP 7.

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dahart 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Note the date: 2016, almost 10 years ago. When I started doing actual web development in like 2014, I’d been using C++ for a couple of decades and it was somewhat of a surprise to me that JavaScript was a real language, because of the low reputation it had among C++ programmers. I didn’t even know JS had conceptual origins tied to Scheme, or I’d have been interested earlier. I hadn’t been aware how amazingly good the dev tools in the browser I used had become, with a debugger and profiler just sitting there. This was all before promises and React and Yarn. I discovered the C++ programmers were mostly wrong and JS had evolved far beyond the misconceptions many people had about it. I think today most C++ programmers are much more aware that JS is a decent functional language that is quite fast and is omnipresent in all browsers. To be fair, the NPM ecosystem was a dumpster fire in many ways. OTOH, this comedy article is just a huge list of hot takes, and language hate has been a pastime of many a web comic, but the mockery has done almost nothing to stop people from using languages.