Random thoughts on Javascript.
As Matthew Butterick put it, Lisp makes me smarter, while anything named *Script kills brain cells on contact.
Here is a comment from Hacker News that sums it up for me: ..they feel like walled gardens of arbitrary knowledge that only applies to their ecosystem rather than to some fundamental learning about software. When I learned about OOP I was able to understand OOP code in a broad range of applications, languages and frameworks, but learning how react works gives me no insight into anything but react, and it’s even abstracted enough from JavaScript that you could learn React without ever properly knowing how to write JavaScript (which is something I’ve encountered in a handful of new devs).
It does seem like a lot of Javascript developers are like small children: They only know Javascript, and cannot imagine anyone not knowing only Javascript. Like iPhone users but worse. They seem to constantly re-invent the wheel, and there seems to be no collective learning. If Javascript is so wonderful, why are there so many libraries, frameworks and entire languages that transpile to Javascript? If Javascript is so wonderful, why do people go through all that effort to avoid dealing with Javascript directly?
Whenever I tell people I want nothing to do with Javascript, I get the same song and dance that “you have to know Javascript.” First off, I do not use it at my current job, so for a lot of jobs you do not. But I do have to use apps made by Microsoft. Because I have to. I am tired of using garbage because I have to. That is one reason I tend not to call in to the Austin Clojure Meetup when they talk about ClojureScript. Lisp is something I want to learn. I spend enough time with things I have to use. Don’t pollute the stuff I want to use with the stuff I have to use.
And usually you get to the first stage of “you have to use X” because a lot of people are too lazy or too stupid to investigate alternatives. The second stage is the X that you have to use is the only alternative, and most people are too lazy or too stupid to know there ever was an alternative. If I wanted to do what everybody else does, I would not be interested in Lisp or Clojure. You use Lisp because you know the world is wrong.
Maybe everybody else uses it because everybody else is stupid. JS is like Windows: It is a status quo that everybody defends, nobody actually chose, and very few actually like.
I don’t buy the argument that developers should learn Javascript because it is a combination of Lisp (the good parts) and C (everything else). “It has the stuff you like with the stuff you do not like.” I would like my life to have more of the stuff that I like, and less of the stuff I do not like, not to mix them together. “It’s Lisp and C” is really a reason to learn Lisp.
I am tired of being treated like a dog, and people thinking that I will just eat whatever is put in front of me.
But I am not the only one. The README for Coast states “It uses a relational database and renders html on the server without javascript which allows you to ship your web applications faster.” The Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book called Programming Phoenix LiveView: Interactive Elixir Web Programming Without Writing Any JavaScript. Granted, they do not seem to be against JS. I think that LiveView is like GWT: You write code in Elixir (LiveView) or Java (GWT), and it gets translated to JS. Because JS is too complicated.
The PDFs for that book said that we need JS to make single-page apps and give users all the “modern” features of the web: like notifications and infinite scroll. Personally, I need fewer notifications and I hate infinite scroll. JS seems to give nothing but bloat. Granted, there are some things it is useful for: I think a lot of video players are done with JS. But beyond that, all JS has given us is bloat and complexity. I feel like I am spending more and more time on websites waiting for circles or rings to stop spinning.
I think we need to get back to CRUD apps. The kind we used to make 10 years ago. Yes, you had to know several languages, like HTML, CSS, SQL, maybe some Javascript. But you could focus on a language that interested you, like Java, or Ruby, or Python. Now it seems like a lot of people want to make it all Javascript all the time, now it’s Javascript AND maybe a little bit of the thing you really wanted to learn. Two years ago I took a course on Pluralsight about making web services in Go. The course included an Angular app to view the database. The Angular app takes up 589 megabytes on my hard drive. I took the course to learn how to use Go, not deal with Javascript. It reminds me of Joe Armstrong’s line about OOP: I just wanted a banana, not the monkey holding the banana and the tree it is sitting in.
Why they did not have a prerequisite course about making a web application in Go is beyond me.
Javascript is like someone comes to a restaurant, and at first they seem outgoing and charismatic. Then you realize the guy is groping all the women, he’s hammered and you can’t get rid of him.
I haven’t gotten around to reading any of the PDFs I have going over the history of Lisp. Perhaps for a couple of decades the Lisp world was total chaos like JS is today. But now it isn’t. Why not stand on the shoulders of giants?
If my impression of Javascript is out of date, so be it. It wasn’t my idea to ignore history and push a language which was described by its own creator as having “a lot of stupid in it.” He is still jerking around the world by giving us a browser that shields you from ads so they can give you their ads. And if that isn’t shady enough, Brave is involved with corrupt-o-currency. This guy is the poster jerk for crank magnetism.
I am open to learning new things. Lisp. Go. Elixir. Functional programming. Graph databases. I probably need to learn more about relational databases. Just using Emacs will help you to pick up new things: Org mode, CIDER. I learned some Scheme and Racket and how to get them working in Emacs so I could go through Simply Scheme so I could eventually go through SICP.
I have noticed that when people judge you for not being open to new ideas or learning something new, what they are really doing is being judgemental because you are not interested in what they are interested in. Being open to new ideas does not mean being open to all ideas.
You’re welcome.
Image from the Melisende Psalter, a 12th century manuscript assumed to have been created at the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre; housed in the British Library as Egerton MS 1139, assumed allowed under Public Domain.