If you’re provided a tool that solves a problem, I don’t really get ignoring that and continuing to focus on that solved problem as if it weren’t solved because you think all the tools should solve it on principle
That’s a little bit like saying, “I don’t understand why people continue to complain about the landmine sitting right there on the ground. We’ve painted it red so you can easily walk around it, so how has the problem not been solved?”
Land mines are painted red in my shop. You want to change the language to remove a land mine that everyone competent already knows enough to step around. The problem has already been solved, so why are you continuing to complain about it?
Just to be clear, I’m not actually calling for JavaScript to change, I’m just pointing out that people are right to point out this as being a problem. Having said that, if everyone competent uses linters now so that this feature isn’t used in practice anymore, then getting rid of it shouldn’t even break anything, and arguably code which would break is already broken because it uses an operator that no one should be using, so you shouldn’t be using this code anyway.
I can sort of get down with what you’re saying, but on the other hand, we all have design constraints, inside and outside of programming, I think this is a very minor one
Using linters in a professional setting is more like moving all your actual employees into a different office and letting them use robot avatars in the original office who can never step on that landmine.
The benefit of this is that millions of other robots continue to depend on the original office being exactly as it is and many of them will never change or update, nor is their any need for them to.
Breaking backwards compatibility on the web needs much better reasoning than ‘I don’t want to use a linter’.
Sure, but you can get frameworks that generate that for you. I’ve written whole webpages in WASM without writing any JS.
You don’t get around reading JS documentation, though. Especially the DOM API is just documented as JS, and you basically hope that your framework makes it obvious enough how to write that in your non-JS language of choice.
This is exactly the reason why I can’t believe that was ever a requirement. I would have crazy respect for webassembly if it could stand on it’s own as it would allow people to completely move away from JS, but if JS is still in the stack in any way it will introduce a (even if it is minimal) compatibility and maintenance cost in the long run.
I used to think so, too, but on the one hand, the DOM API is absolutely massive. Going through the standardization, implementation and documentation process another time would take decades.
And on the other hand, a language-agnostic API in WebAssembly would mean specifying it WebAssembly itself. And well, it’s Assembly-like, so what’s currently a single line for calling a JS function would turn into tens of lines of low-level code.
Ultimately, you’d want code from some other high-level language to give you a summary of how you may need to call your language-specific wrapper. In practice, that’s likely even worse than translating it from JS, because the high-level call isn’t standardized.
i believe they plan to remove that requirement? at least i know they are trying to use a native wasm<->dom api instead of wasm<->js<->dom, which is slow
Big if true, do you have a link to follow that development? I’ve been curious about some languages that compile to JS+WASM but I’ve been waiting for something like this to finally cut out the middle man and give me an excuse to learn WASM directly.
There’s actually in theory all the pieces in place to use a different scripting language, because in the early days, there really were multiple. But yeah, the massive DOM API is only really standardized+implemented+documented for JS, so you don’t get around it in the end.
As the others said, though, WebAssembly is starting to become a thing and the JS boilerplate for calling the DOM API can be generated for you.
Most of the weirdness comes from being designed for the web, and specifically for working with forms. The value of a form field will always be a string, which is a simple and straightforward idea, but then the trouble showed up when we tried to make it more convenient to work that way.
Actually, most of the weirdness comes from having been originally designed in a matter of 10 days by a single engineer working to accommodate a tight release schedule.
I mean, do you think that has more explanatory power though? The type coercion rules are actually more elaborate with == than necessary for equality checking, because it was intended as a clever convenience for working with strings. If it was really all about the short timeline, wouldn’t you just skip that and do a more straightforward equality comparison, like the algorithm that === implements?
Besides, it’s not like everything in the language was conceived and implemented in those 10 days. The language has been evolving steadily since then. I’m not even sure if the modern == comparison algorithm worked that way in the first iteration.
Personally, I find it more useful to understand the context that lets me say “that’s a quirky consequence of a sensible principle,” rather than blaming it on the “ten days” legend generically.
I think the “ten days” explanation has the merit of being charitable, because it implies that Brendan Eich wouldn’t have made such short-sighted design choices under more favorable circumstances.
(I do not believe that it’s a “sensible principle” to treat text as such a fundamental form of data that a basic language feature like the equality operator should be entirely shaped around it. Surely the consequences of building an entire language around text manipulation should be apparent by considering how awkward Posix-style shells are for any nontrivial scripts.)
Well… The circumstances were that he was asked to whip up a little scripting language, that felt a little like Java and a little like Scheme, which could be used to add simple manipulations and interactions to web pages. Specifically to web pages. Not webservers, mobile apps, databases, banking systems, physics simulations, robotics… Only web pages. And nobody had even conceived yet of something like Google Sheets-- It was simple HTML forms and DOM manipulation.
IMO in that context, it makes alot of sense. I think it was probably still the wrong decision-- definitely with the benefit of hindsight, and quite possibly even at the time, even in that narrow context. Way more trouble than it’s worth.
But it’s beneficial to know that there was a principled (if misguided) reason behind it, that ties into the nature and history of the language-- It’s not simply “dude was in a hurry and not thinking.” Both are kinda true, but the former perspective helps us understand something useful, whereas the latter doesn’t get us anywhere interesting.
Can you write a website in other languages, like c# or python?
Yeah, anything that outputs HTML and CSS can do so. There’s a module for Apache to write webpages in Python (libapache-mod-python) and I’m p sure someone somewhere made a module to do it in Rust already except they’re infighting over whether tag parsing in it should be marked unsafe.
For that matter you do can write web pages in your shell eg.: bash, that’s what CGI is all about.
I guess why it’s weird because of the loose rules it follows, like what is mentioned about === and ==. There is WebAssembly which kinda acts like Javabyte code or CIL there used to be huge hype that it’s going to replace JavaScript, though it’s not used that much today. I think why there is low adoption is mainly because JavaScript is good enough, it’s widespread and easy to learn.
if you don't believe that adding more structure to the absolute maniacal catastrophe that is sql is a good thing then i'm going to start to have doubts about your authenticity as a human being
SQL is incredibly structured. It’s also a very good language, and developers need to stop piling on junk on top of it and producing terrible queries. Learn the damn language. It’s not that hard
If you think this is more structured than traditional SQL, I really disagree. Is this a select * query, it’s ambiguous. Also what table is being queried here there’s no from or other table identifier.
it was written to be a language that anybody could read or write as well as english, which just like every other time that's been tried, results in a language that's exactly as anal about grammar as C or Python except now it's impossible to remember what that structure is because adding anything to the language to make that easier is forbidden
when you write a language where its designers were so keen for it to remain human readable that they made deleting all rows in a table the default action, i don't think "well structured" can be used to describe it
having is less annoying way of not doing needless/bug-prone repetition. if you select someCalculatedValue(someInput) as lol you can add having lol > 42 in mysql, whereas without (ie in pgsql) you’d need to do where someCalculatedValue(someInput) > 42, and make sure changes to that call stay in sync despite how far apart they are in a complex sql statement.
Postgres has the having clause. If it didn’t, that wouldn’t work, as you can’t use aggregates in a where. If you have to make do without having, for some reason, you can use a subquery, something like select * from (select someCalculatedValue(someInput) as lol) as stuff where lol > 42, which is very verbose, but doesn’t cause the sync problem.
Also, I don’t think they were saying the capability having gives is bad, but that a new query language should be designed such that you get that capability without it.
Because you never learned SQL properly, from the sound of it.
You might be right, though, to be fair, I also keep forgetting syntax of stuff when I don’t use it very often (read SQL (._.`))
Also, ORMa produce trash queries and are never expressive enough.
I meant to say that I would like the raw SQL syntax to be more similar to other programming languages to avoid needing to switch between thinking about different flows of logic
No. The arrow function in where eliminates any possibility of using indexes. And how do you propose to deal with logical expressions without resorting to shit like .orWhereNot() and callback hell? And, most importantly, what about joins?
Yeah, it’s true. I knew all the other ones, had to put that one in the dev tools console to believe it. I was just happy to know === continues to be sane in that comparison.
That would be weird if a string containing a space wasn't equal to 0 " " == 0, but that's not the case in JS. If you think that "" and " " being equal to 0 is weird then I agree, but since they are, you should expect "t" and "n" to equal 0 too.
The == operator in JS will try to cast the things being compared and do all kinds of ‘smart’ assumptions about what equality means. This is why everyone uses === instead…
If " " wasn't equal to 0, it wouldn't make sense, but since a string containing a space equals 0, you'd expect the same to apply to a string containing a tab or a newline. (or at least I'd expect that)
I admit I have never dabbled in javascript, despite being a proficient programmer. I now dread to ask... would any string that contains only whitespace == 0? " \t\n \t " for example?
Yes, it would. Just like a string of spaces " " == 0, but it isn't that bad; === is Javascript's version of == in other languages, and, thus, you should be using it if you don't want that wonkiness.
== is just for convenience, like when you want to make sure that the user didn't leave the form empty and the button shouldn't be greyed out, and other UI stuff. Without these kinds of features JS wouldn't be used in so many toolkits.
Ok, I always mistakenly assumed === was the identity operator in JS, too. TIL, thanks! As much as we like to poke fun at JS, every time I’m taught the rationale behind some aspect of it, I find it redeeming and even a little endearing.
The explanation given to you makes it sound like == was deliberately designed to be a more convenient version of ===, but what actually happened was that == used to be the only equality operator in JavaScript, which meant that if you didn’t want it’s auto-coercing behavior then you needed to go out of your way to add additional type checks yourself. Because this was obviously a tremendously inconvenient state of affairs, the === operator was introduced later so that you could test for equality without having to worry about JavaScript doing something clever underneath the hood that you weren’t expecting.
The explanation given to you makes it sound like == was deliberately designed to be a more convenient version of ===
I mean technically == was deliberately designed to be a more convenient version of other languages’ == operator… Just specifically more convenient for light UI stuff since that was all JavaScript was supposed to be used for at the time (or all they thought it would be used for).
But give programmers a way to write and execute a small script and someone will eventually use that to try and write an emulator that emulates the computer it’s running on, so the web evolved into more complicated applications, and then that convenience turned out to be wildly inconvenient, not to mention horribly unexpected for programmers coming from other languages, so then they added the triple equality to match other languages.
You have to remember that the underlying principle of JavaScript seemed to be “never throw an error”, even if what it’s being told to do is weapons grade bollocks.
I’d like you to think for a moment about CTEs, the HAVING clause, window functions and every other funky and useful thing you can do in SQL … Now just think, do you think that this syntax supports all those correctly?
true, but having it look like a component might get annoying. since this is likely to stay at the top, having an island of non components between two components might make it hard to see where functions start and end. and if this isn’t used directly inside a component it’ll just look dumb and inefficient (this also looks like it’ll take way more to edit once you change something)
I think I agree with you both. I’m not a Node developer; could you keep your SQL objects/components in a separate file so that they don’t clutter up other logic?
I was disgusted by the XML at first, but it’s a readable query returning a sane JSON object.
Meanwhile, I’m mantaining Java code where the SQL is a perfectly square wall of text, and some insane mofo decided the way to read the resulting list of Object[] 🤮 is getting each column by index… so I’d switch to SQXMLL in a heartbeat.
Remember, XML was actually designed for use cases like this, that’s why it came with XPath and XSLT, which let you make it executable in a sense by performing arbitrary transformations on an XML tree.
Back in the day, at my first coding job, we had an entire program that had a massive data model encoded in XML, and we used a bunch of XSL to programmatically convert that into Java objects, SQL queries, and HTML forms. Actually worked fairly well, except of course that XSL was an awful language to do that all in.
React simply figured out how to use JavaScript as the transformation language instead.
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