That's true but at the same time the fact that JavaScript equality is so broken that they needed a === operator is exactly the problem I'm talking about.

And those examples were low hanging fruit but there are a million other ways JavaScript just makes it easy to write buggy code that doesn't scale because the JavaScript abstraction hides everything that's actually going on.

For example, all of the list abstractions (map, filter, reduce, etc.) will copy the array to a new list every time you chain them. Doing something like .filter(condition).map(to new value) will copy the list twice and iterate over each new list separately. In most other languages (Java, C#, Rust, Go, etc.) the list abstractions are done over some sort of iterator or stream before being converted back into a list so that the copy only has to be done once. This makes using list abstractions pretty slow in JavaScript, especially when you have to chain multiple of them.

Another simple but really annoying thing that I've seen cause a lot of bugs - Array.sort will convert everything into strings and then sort if you don't give it a comparison function. Yes, even with a list of numbers. [ -2, -1, 1, 2, 10 ] will become [ -1, -2, 1, 10, 2 ] when you sort it unless you pass in a function. But if you're looking over code you wrote to check it, seeing a list.sort() won't necessarily stand out to most people as looking incorrect, but the behavior doesn't match what most people would assume.

All this is also without even getting started on the million JS frameworks and libraries which make it really easy to have vendor lock-in and version lock-in at the same time because upgrading or switching packages frequently requires a lot of changes unless you're specifically isolating libraries to be useful (see any UI package x, and then the additional version x-react or x-angular)

Tldr; Why can't we have nice things JS?

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is all true, although I don't think it warrants saying that it's worse than PHP.

[–] Zangoose@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's fair. I was mostly commenting on my own experiences with JS/TS, I've never used PHP so I can't say if it's better or worse but a few people I know have said that modern PHP is actually pretty good for personal projects. I'm guessing it would have its own set of nightmares if it was scaled to an enterprise level though.

[–] madeindjs@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

For example, all of the list abstractions (map, filter, reduce, etc.) will copy the array to a new list every time you chain them.

This methods were added to generator recently. So you can avoid copying the array in memory.

All this is also without even getting started on the million JS frameworks and libraries which make it really easy to have vendor lock-in and version lock-in at the same time

In my opinion, it's also what make JS good. There a package for almost everything.