Re: Javascript: The Good Parts... Required reading?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:
> Things may have changed, I may have some of it wrong and I'm sure I'm not
> catching some of the "advantages", but I think I have the essence correct:
> JavaScript has had waaaay too many "great ideas" added to it.

For sure!  And once a feature has been added, it cannot be removed
easily without annoying people that they can't say "13:34:17" any
more.

I came to JS fairly late, and enjoyed the Lua-with-braces feeling;  a
lot of people seem unable to think about software without having an
explicit 'class' construct and have never forgiven JS for that. But
man, the warts!  However, not a bad job for something knocked together
in a hurry - at least he understood Scheme (although he did not
incorporate the key "lexical scoping" feature)

> I did not anticipate that, after reading this book, my tolerance for
> building castles in the sky would be far less.

In language design, everything has consequences.  It seems harmless to
allow ? at the end of identifiers - predicates do then read nicely -
but it closes the chance to use ? for other purposes (e.g. the safe
navigation operator).

Relevant quote (used by lhf):

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey