Why Javascript is a Joy

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  1. “Anyway I know only one programming language worse than C and that is Javascript. […] I was convinced that we needed to build-in a programming language, but the developers, Tim first, were very much opposed. It had to remain completely declarative. Maybe, but the net result is that the programming-vacuum filled itself with the most horrible kluge in the history of computing: Javascript.”
    Robert Cailliau – co-developer of the www
     
    Just sayin’…

    1. Could well be, but when was that quote from? Javascript has been a very misunderstood language until the like of Crockford and Resig shown what is possible rather than the kludge that was thrown together before. And as more and more “hardcore” developers have turned to Javascript the quality of the code that has been written has drastically improved. Look at it this way, you can open up Visual Studio, add in a couple of aspx pages, throw in some control and text from the toolbox, use the page designer… or you can code it by hand. 

      1.  For being a knowitall, you don’t seem to know that s-expressions only run once without the global flag.

    1. What would you consider a “higher power language” for web development that I’m missing? Coffeescript? GWT? Neither let you do things like http://square.github.com/tesseract/.

  2. Totally Agree!  : )  Those that don’t know… don’t know.  Call them JS: joy – denyers. Times are changing folks. Get on board.

  3. I have a toy test that, I guess, mostly measures object creation and method calling overhead. The results in millions of iterations may be interesting though:
    Java – 7.7
    C# – 7.0
    C++ – 2.7
    JS Opera – 0.57
    JS Chrome – 0.50
    JS IE9 – 0.38
    Ruby – 0.15
    PHP – 0.10
    Python3 – 0.07
    Looks like JS is not a toy. More so if Windows 8 is not a toy.

    1. You need to provide those tests.  This type of assertion flies in the face of my experience.  It seems to me there is NO way Javascript is > 10x faster than Java/C# and 5x faster than C++.  Think about it for a moment.  The Javascript engines (any of them) are developed using C/C++.  According to these results, the creators of the JavaScript engine have code running faster than the the original compiler.  Come on.  Be an evangelist but be be credible.

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