"Moreover, JS is really fast to write and test. Write – save – refresh[2]; it’s an absurdly fast dev cycle that lets me iterate on questionable portions of the code much faster than any environment I’ve worked in."
That is just full of crap. What he forgets to mention is that you have to fix a good deal of the bugs at runtime(spending time in debugger), that would otherwise be picked up by a compiler and also figuring out the workarounds on the shitty toolchain.
"We now send hundreds of kb’s of minified Javascript to the client, and we expect all of it to run smoothly."
Again, these are inherent deficiencies of the toolchain, where you have to compress the textual code, instead of using byte-code.
And on top of that we have Coffee Script, LESS, SASS, Jade and God knows what to try to compensate for the amount of legacy, instead of just rebuild proper framework from the start, right and for all.
And on top of that we have Coffee Script, LESS, SASS, Jade and God knows what to try to compensate for the amount of legacy, instead of just rebuild proper framework from the start, right and for all.
But it's not just a case of rebuilding a proper framework, the "internet" is just too big to scrap everything that is already there... we'd end up with this real mixture of technologies floating around, browsers become more bloated to support both set of technologies, we end up with those "Best Viewed in..." gif's all over the place again AND we would never be able to fully move onto that tech set for a long long time... how long before HTML5/CSS3 become the defacto standard for every new project you work on? I'm currently working on a site which needs to work with Javascript off AND support IE6 (both of which just sucks balls).
I am a bit biased. I love working with JavaScript (I am a C# developer btw) and I have loved seeing it evolve, how much it can do, how well it can do it and how GOOD javascript code makes it very easy and straight forward to work with... on the flip side of that I have seen far too many rubbish scripts from non-programmers!
What he forgets to mention is that you have to fix a good deal of the bugs at runtime(spending time in debugger), that would otherwise be picked up by a compiler and also figuring out the workarounds on the shitty toolchain
I think that this is a subjective position, some people find that the dev cycle is faster, in some cases fast enough to offset the debugging and yet others don't experience the issue to the degree that it is highlighted. I see this position from a good deal of people that prefer static languages and for me personally it is just not a huge issue. I just don't run into the issue that static languages are supposed to save me from enough to forgo the rapid development of languages such as JavaScript and Lisp. I think this issue is bore more out of how each of us develops and thinks, rather than some correctness of one over the other.
That is just full of crap. What he forgets to mention is that you have to fix a good deal of the bugs at runtime(spending time in debugger), that would otherwise be picked up by a compiler and also figuring out the workarounds on the shitty toolchain.
"We now send hundreds of kb’s of minified Javascript to the client, and we expect all of it to run smoothly."
Again, these are inherent deficiencies of the toolchain, where you have to compress the textual code, instead of using byte-code.
And on top of that we have Coffee Script, LESS, SASS, Jade and God knows what to try to compensate for the amount of legacy, instead of just rebuild proper framework from the start, right and for all.