209K views · Jan 19, 2013 · 18:27 · 1 HN recommender · 5 mentions · discussed 2013–2024
Brian Leroux's dotJS 2012 talk WTFJS is a quick, humorous tour of JavaScript's odd behaviors and quirks.
Why Hacker News points people here: Linked as a funny tour of JavaScript gotchas, usually to show the language has oddities of its own.
“See also a longer spin of of this talk at the more decent dotJS conference”
Longer version of the WTFJS talk at dotJS
I'm glad that someone posted this :) See also a longer spin of of this talk at the more decent dotJS conference: this video
Cited for JavaScript gotchas that remain despite language size
> No, actually, it doesn't. Perhaps less in what features to avoid, but there's plenty of hidden gotchas to avoid in JavaScript still. this video link > C++ is a huge language, javascript is a relativly small one. C++'s ISO/IEC 14882:2003 weighs in at 786 pages, compared to ECMA-262 (5.1 Edition)'s 258 pages (measuring by PDF reader). A ~3x difference, but not quite the order of magnitude I'd expect from huge vs small.
“Javascript doesn't really have any high ground here[0].”
Cited as evidence JavaScript equality has oddities too
Meh. They're different languages with different expectations. "is" is distinct from "==" in both, and Python gets "==" right (obviously). Javascript doesn't really have any high ground here[0]. (In contrast, Python:) >>> [] == False False >>> object() == False False >>> "" == False False >>> {} == False False They're just different. [0]: this video
“Here's a talk about the (in)sanity of JS”
A talk about the quirks of JavaScript
That's JavaScript for you. Here's a talk about the (in)sanity of JS: this video The same under Clojure (on top of the JVM) shall throw a class cast exception.
“I love JS but here it is 20min of programming jokes in the expense of JS”
I don’t see why you are offended. I love JS but here it is 20min of programming jokes in the expense of JS: this video As it comes to PHP, I don’t say that you can do everything by a single PHP file in a web server folder(actually, you can but not comfortably). I’m trying to illustrate it’s low-code nature. There are no other languages that are that easy to start solving your problem with. Okay, maybe Python. The newer no-code or low-code tools have the same spirit. They are abstraction layers targeting a domain. These days there’s plenty you can do by programming visually without any knowledge of programming languages. Not everything needs to scale for throughput.
