Oh Javascript. This has been said so many times before, but why, oh why, has the world converged on this particular language?
Why aren't there saner alternatives to Javascript in browsers? We have so many languages at our disposal, why choose Javascript? Why don't people realize that web programming is not great because of Javascript but despite Javascript?
We are bound to Javascript on the web because browsers, for whatever reason, don't support anything else. But we don't have to make matters worse by dragging this weirdo language unto the rest of the programming world.
But who am I kidding, AppleScript may be one of the few languages actually worse than Javascript.
You already know all the good stuff about weak typing and equality.
But let me give you a few recent examples I stumbled over:
- Javascript can not format numbers with leading zeros.
- Handling binary data is increadibly painful.
- Object oriented programming is really convoluted.
- Lack of classes and modules makes code structuring hard.
True, it could be worse. But Lua, Ruby, Python, Perl, Scheme, Clojure, and many others are much better languages with very similar feature sets. And then there's a whole host of languages with different features. I just don't see why you would Javascript in an environment where all these other alternatives are available.
Why aren't there saner alternatives to Javascript in browsers? We have so many languages at our disposal, why choose Javascript? Why don't people realize that web programming is not great because of Javascript but despite Javascript?
We are bound to Javascript on the web because browsers, for whatever reason, don't support anything else. But we don't have to make matters worse by dragging this weirdo language unto the rest of the programming world.
But who am I kidding, AppleScript may be one of the few languages actually worse than Javascript.