It may not be perfectly compatible, but being mostly compatible with C was a large part of its selling point when it was originally announced. Without that, it probably wouldn’t have seen as much adoption. However, that choice also led to a lot of difficult design decisions which have become a liability today.
I’m not trying to goad you into an argument, though I could have admittedly phrased things better. I just can’t think of any reason why someone would want adopt Javascript as it is with all of its problems. A slice of pie is better than nothing at all. On the other hand, using Javascript when a much better alternative exists (namely Typescript) would be a significant liability in my opinion.
In fact, pretty much everyone on our front-end team at work would agree too - they’re pretty much unanimous in saying that Javascript should basically never be used.
I also agree that Javascript is worse. C++ has two excuses for being bad:
Javascript has neither of those two excuses. People only use it today because of the ubiquity of web programming. In fairness, it did kill off a few other technologies, like Flash and Java applets, but that was more Webkit and Chrome picking it as the winner than anything else.
Maybe these arguments are a bit hand-wavy, but the way I see it, it’s like the C of the web programming era.
C++ and JS are objectively shit languages from the pool of used languages.
This is a great point. There are a lot of even worse languages that are dead/dying and deserve to do so.
But personally, I see a lot of people who continue to defend JS. And I have worked in C++ for about 5 years now and nobody I have worked with praises the language - most want to ditch it entirely and switch to Rust. I can think of maybe one person who claims that C++ is good enough, which is hardly any praise.
This is all anecdotal stuff, so maybe we don’t see eye-to-eye though. I personally love C++, because it’s a really fun language to write, but I simultaneously think it’s an awful language, and the people who write/standardize it keep making the same kinds of bad mistakes over and over again.
It’s perfectly possible for a slice of pie to be pleasant, and a slice of pie with ice cream to be more pleasant.
In my personal opinion though, that’s not how I would describe Javascript vs. Typescript. Javascript was basically replaced overnight, to the point where you should be very harshly criticized for ever using it these days unless you’re maintaining a legacy project.
As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441
Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.
Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.
I’m not a fan of AI personally, but the “copying others’ work” argument never resonated with me. The internet makes copying data trivial - if you still get worked up over people using a technology that has been trivial since the '90s, well, I don’t know what to tell you, but you’re just not going to win that one. People are just going to keep doing it anyway and maybe it sucks, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
The only reason file sharing is illegal today is because nobody bribed politicians to keep it legal.
Even the early internet didn’t have content of this high quality
“Young people enjoying their youth in ways that make older generations scornful and jealous” - the perennial headline
Damn! Matchmaking is definitely really hard at high MMR levels, and I remember back when I read reddit about how many people would post angrily about matchmaking - there’s no easy solution to that problem at that point. I remember watching a twitch stream after TI9 where Ana was fountain farming an opposing team until they got an abandon. (The deserved it for being asses in the allchat to be honest, but the skill gap was still obscene.)
But at the same time, your experience is exactly how I figured things would go if I ever tried to play Dota seriously. When I played football in my teenage years, I realized that eventually, you reach a point where getting better stops being fun because everyone else is equally talented and trying their hardest to get to the next level too. At that point, I realized that I just wanted to have fun and stopped competing. Still played recreationally in my regional league though. We had terrible results, but losing on a bad team was a lot more fun than winning on a good one.
Glad to hear that Dota helped you kick all your bad habits. It’s always good to find a silver lining, no matter how crappy the situation is.
In my case, it’s age. I only have so much free time during a day, and ruining it on a shitty Dota2 pub match just makes me feel like trash for weeks later. Even today, I cringe when I think back on some of the stupid things I did in that game.
The last thing I need is more embarrassing memories running through my brain when I’m trying to sleep at night.
I got to about the same level of ascension in Slay the Spire. Eventually, I realized that dying 10 times in a row before getting the dream deck for finishing a high ascension level just… wasn’t that entertaining. When a game has too much RNG, it becomes about as much fun as flipping a coin and trying to get heads 5 times in a row. Oh and also, when you do get that perfect deck, it becomes even more stressful making sure that you don’t screw it up and have to start from the beginning all over again!
Now I just play with ascension off entirely. The A20 achievement is the only one I don’t have, and probably never will.
I feel this. I can’t even play a game of chess online without feeling stressed out. I love playing against friends, but against anonymous strangers, I just can’t do it. It’s a damn shame - I sank about 3000 hours into Dota 2, and about 98% of it was against bots.
I do enjoy co-op games these days though, but again, it’s still better with friends.
Super Metroid. It’s supposed to be a classic but I can’t stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.
The Metroid prime series were great though.
I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.
So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!
Why are root privileges needed to move and search for files in the home directory?
Yes, of course the codemopolitan directory could be owned by root, but why??
The user is able to install new certificates.
That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.
If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.
Sure, I’m familiar with the conditions under which Javascript was created, but those are all political issues, not technical ones.
If you had to go back and recreate another C++, you would be forgiven for creating a bad language, because making a good, usable language without a garbage collector is really hard, and even moreso when it has to be compatible with C. If you had to recreate Javascript… I would think it would be expected that you don’t make a language with the same kinds of flaws JS has today. There were plenty of examples of languages Javascript could have been based off of when it was written (like Java).
Case in point: it took decades for Rust to come around which was the first real challenge to C++. In the same period of time, we saw several GC languages appear (Java, C#, Go, PHP, Swift, Ruby, Python, all younger than C++), all competing against each other. Javascript would have been abandoned if it didn’t have a monopoly on web programming.