This line seems to sum up the core of the complaint:
> When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty?
The ruby-lang mailing list used to be full of these sorts of discussions. If the author hasn't come across these factors being spoken about, that says more about the social value systems around the dominant ecosystems than about any fundamental complexity. Ruby lost the PR war to JS.
> Coding tools were around before UI/UX was a thing...
...yeah, no. At least, not in a way that makes the author's point. COBOL was an attempt to improve the developer experience. UI research predates JS by decades.
This paragraph approaches the complexities in JS as though they were a natural consequence of when JS was written, as though it wasn't possible to have done any better so we've all got to live with the best that was available then, rather than what we know now. That's just not true. JS even when invented wasn't a good language. Brendan Eich wanted to write a Scheme, and we'd all have been better off if he'd got away with it, and also if he'd had more than 10 days to implement it. The things we complain about in JS were commonly known to be bad at the time, they just didn't end up fixed for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology.
regularfry|6 years ago
> When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty?
The ruby-lang mailing list used to be full of these sorts of discussions. If the author hasn't come across these factors being spoken about, that says more about the social value systems around the dominant ecosystems than about any fundamental complexity. Ruby lost the PR war to JS.
> Coding tools were around before UI/UX was a thing...
...yeah, no. At least, not in a way that makes the author's point. COBOL was an attempt to improve the developer experience. UI research predates JS by decades.
This paragraph approaches the complexities in JS as though they were a natural consequence of when JS was written, as though it wasn't possible to have done any better so we've all got to live with the best that was available then, rather than what we know now. That's just not true. JS even when invented wasn't a good language. Brendan Eich wanted to write a Scheme, and we'd all have been better off if he'd got away with it, and also if he'd had more than 10 days to implement it. The things we complain about in JS were commonly known to be bad at the time, they just didn't end up fixed for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology.