JavaScript

I was thinking about the problem with JavaScript and the misery it brings to people. I think I’ve pinned it down to a conflict of interest.

Software is supposed to serve the user who runs it. That’s the expectation, and rightfully so. It’s not supposed to serve anyone else. Free software is true to this principle, loosely under the FSF “freedom 0” principle.

Non-free software is problematic because the user cannot see the code. The code only has to pretend to serve the user while in reality it serves the real master (the corporation who profits from it).

JavaScript has a similar conflict of interest. It’s distributed by the same entity who operates API services -- a stakeholder. Regardless of whether the JS is free software or not, there is an inherent conflict of interest whereby the JS is produced by a non-user party to the digital transactions. This means the software is not working for the user. It’s only pretending to.

Andrez Sainz de Aja writes that comments are a code smell: they make us lazy. Instead of using comments to convey intent, the coding should. But that is hard, so it is easier to write dumb coding and just put the intent into comments.

Personally, I like that it's more command-line friendly than Java, although I don't trust TS as much as Java's simpler type system

Hey all,

I couldn't find any communities for JS or TS or similar so I figured I'd put one together. I'll hopefully start putting some posts in here later today, but feel free to come share what you've been working on, cool things or tricks you've found, problems you've run into, or whatever else you want :)

Be nice, write good code, have a fun time. -Ash