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"Being able to do everything with a single language is kind of a big deal for many companies;"

Its a shame that so far JavaScript seems to be the only language you can use on the client and server. I come from a Perl background and every time I try to do something in JS it seems like a kludge.




Ha...funny, I once worked on an ASP application writtent with Active Perl, back when coding the "front-end" meant server side templates...


Decent compile-to-js languages can work as well. CoffeeScript is probably the most prominent, but ClojureScript seems especially promising to me.


Is debugging not a pain in these languages?


I don't have experience with ClojureScript yet, but CoffeeScript is trivial to debug since the source and the compiled JavaScript are structurally very similar.


I come from a JS background, and every time I try to read Perl it seems like a kludge.

Boom. Objective opinion about a language I'm not good at. See what I did there?


Perl is a kludge for a lot of things like its standard OOP. JS is worse.

(I am generally using Python these days, which does seem to be a lot better thought out than either of the other two).


JS is better thought out than either Perl or Python. (Since we're just stating opinions without arguments here).


Ok, if you really need some arguments have a look here. You will see that JavaScript has 3 or 4 times the amount of complainants that Python does.

https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks

On top of that Python has a solid set of libraries for it. In my experience with JavaScript (admittedly a lot more limited than with Python or Perl), the library support is far poorer. Angular is one of the most popular frameworks out there and the documentation is terrible. Compare that to any major framework in Python or Perl and you will see the difference.


IIRC, JS was designed and initially implemented by a single programmer in about 10 days.

It's far better than could reasonably be expected given that, but it still sucks. Some of the things that immediately come to mind WRT not being well thought out are bad number handling, lack of modules, and possibly the number of warnings needed about how "this" behaves.


Having to emulate block scope with functions is number one for me. Its not like you can avoid that sort of programming in anything non-trivial.


Yes, the the first version of JavaScript was pretty bad. It's been improved since.




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