The more I use JavaScript, the more annoyed at it I get.

[xiphias]

I mean, it's not DIFFICULT to use or anything, but it's so awkward. It's . . . inelegant. Things that should be analogous use different syntax, for no apparent reason. The equality operator is "===".

It's like it was designed by independent people at different times who weren't in consultation with each other, and then bodged together at the last minute. I swear, the thing looks like it was designed by, I dunno, MBAs or something. Or maybe planaria. Or maybe even flatworms with MBAs.

Comments

[alienne.livejournal.com]

It's actually a really lovely language if you take it on its own terms. The thing you really have to remember is, it only *looks* like C. It's *actually* LISP.

And another recommendation here for Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts. Crockford is really brilliant in general. He also has a website with several essays about JS worth reading.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Great. Guess what computer language was largely responsible for the first time I flunked out of school? Well, Scheme, technically, but still.

[alienne.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never managed to grok LISP, myself, actually. But i do love JS, and love it more the more i do with it. I do think reading Crockford is probably hugely helpful -- at least some of the stuff on his site, if you can't find/afford/deal with the book.

(And there are actually two equality operators in JS, btw: you can use '==', but it does type coercion, as someone else mentioned. The reason to use '===' is that it doesn't coerce types, so it's a lot safer.)

You're also not WRONG about it being a language designed by committee, mind. There's some really STUPID shit in JS, precisely because of that. But it is also true that on its own merits, it has a lot of really marvelous stuff. I am in particular deeply in love with prototypal inheritance, because it makes SENSE to me in a way that "classical" inheritance never really has.