On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 14:13:53 UTC, Brandon Ragland wrote:
This might be true, but then you're boiling down the whole reason JavaScript took off: Frameworks. JavaScript is a horrendous language to use, unless you throw some common framework at it that attempts to unify all the browser quirks into easy APIs, such as jQuery or Mootools.
Javascript is never going to be great, but it is "ok" if you approach it like you would approach C and use the Closure compiler with type annotations. Closure does a reasonable job of constant folding and inlining. Of course, some tricks like coercing numbers to int by "x|0" are a bit annoying to type.
Typescript 1.5 is a lot more convenient than plain javascript. It emulates some ES6 syntax like proper foreach "for(var e of somearray)" and provides typed interfaces and more usual OO-inheritance. I am looking forward to Angular2 which is written in Typescript.
Browser quirk libraries no longer have merits IMO. For many projects IE8 is out, IE9 is becoming obsolete and IE10 is quickly replaced by IE11. MDN and caniuseit documents browser support fairly well.
JavaScript was never designed to be a language to run games or high-performance software with.
Yes, also writing games on the web is difficult as the GPU capabilities varies a lot.
Any language can be optimized more heavily if we throw the framework(s) out. However, your development time sky-rockets. In today's moving world, companies simply don't have time for that. Thus the end result: bloated web pages that stall and lag due to un-optimized framework heavy JavaScript.
I think one of the problems with webdev is that customers/superiors are lead to expect a lot less development time than for native. I sometimes think that the relative effortless creation of HTML webpage or setting up a WordPress site has a negative effect on expectations for web app development.
