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Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy?

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-an-acquired-taste dept.

DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"

9 of 575 comments (clear)

  1. Javascript: The good parts by mhh91 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suggest reading this book, it's gotten a lot of good reviews, I've seen a lot of people recommend it to people starting out with JS.

    It explains a subset of Javascript that's simple to use, and also the most used in practice.

  2. one word: JQuery by thatisscary · · Score: 5, Informative

    While it won't get you over the loosely typed nature of the language, it will make things a bit more manageable. You can write nice terse code which accomplishes oodles, as opposed to hand rolling everything. There is something nice to javascripting. I find it a nice respite. JQuery makes it beautiful.

  3. Re:A language that compiles to JS by mihajul · · Score: 5, Informative

    On the topic of languages that complile to JS, GWT is very nice, especially if you're using a Java back-end.

  4. Javascript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford) by oldspicepuresport · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is book is worth every penny and more (~$18 on amazon).

    Like the submitter, I come from C/C++/Java background and always despised Javascript whenever I had to deal with it. I picked up this book a few months ago and can confidently say that this book completely changed my view of Javascript. Javascript is a quirky language, and has some really bad parts (the book has a chapter dedicated to the bad parts). This book clearly explains common misconceptions about the language, as well as all the things a programmer used to a more traditional language needs to look out for. The book explains how Javascript works under the hood in great detail (the prototype-chain, functional scope, type conversion and equality, first class objects/functions ,closures, etc.)

    This is a book for programmers, it's not a cookbook or how-to, and you need a good understanding of programming for it to be useful. That being said, for programmers coming from more traditional languages to Javascript, this book is exactly what you're looking for. I can honestly say that in a few short months Javascript has gone from one of my most hated languages to one of my favourites. The language is incredibly powerful and expressive once you get a good understanding of how it works and why.

  5. Re:Going down in flames by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Moving from assembly to Java is a big jump because you're gaining many abstractions that just don't exist in assembly, and giving up some some concreteness that just isn't as useful in Java.

    The exact opposite happens when you move from Java or C++ to JavaScript, and this is what the submitter is suffering from. JavaScript has inferior abstractions compared to what Java and C++ offer. The submitter feels pain because he's apparently an experienced programmer who knows that he's losing many valuable tools when using JavaScript, and getting nothing beneficial in return.

    Just look how stupidly difficult it is in JavaScript to implement even basic inheritance. There are many different ways, and they are all horrible. Java and C++ both make the definition of classes and inheritance hierarchies extremely simple and easy. It's far easier to imitate JavaScript's prototype-based OO approach in Java or C++ than it is to implement rudimentary class-based inheritance in JavaScript.

    JavaScript advocates usually toss out something about "lambda functions" or "closures" at this point. Well, it turns out that they can both be implemented very easily using the proper class support that both Java and C++ offer. Nevertheless, C++11 currently offers some syntactic sugar to make lambda functions easier to work with, and Java 8 will likely support an even easier lambda syntax, as well.

    This is all ignoring the other major problems the submitter highlighted, too. You don't have a compiler doing a lot of type checking automatically when you're using JavaScript. So you have to accept that these errors will be caught by the end user (and they always will be), even if you put in a lot of manual effort basically implementing type checking yourself within your JavaScript code. Then there are the lack of proper IDEs, good debuggers (Firebug pales compared to a real C++ or Java debugger), and the many other tools that a C++ or Java programmers expects to use.

    My advice to the submitter is for him to lower his standards significantly. It'll be painful, but that's the only way to stay sane when using JavaScript. Expect poor results from the language you're using. Expect poor results from the libraries you're using. Expect poor results from the runtimes (browsers) you're targeting. Expect lower-quality software. Expect more end-user complaints. Oh, and welcome to web development.

  6. Re:Going down in flames by chooks · · Score: 5, Informative

    If closures and lambda expressions were so easy to implement using basic inheritance, Java would already have it. Java 7 has no lambda structures or closures. Anonymous inner classes are a hacked on incomplete poor mans semi-closure that provides just enough to get you almost what you want, but not quite. Last I checked, JCP (or related) had this as a work in progress. And will it be a first class construct in Java or some kind of pre-compiler/interpreter/VM? I am not sure, but hopefully the former.

    Java makes many things easier, but functional programming constructs is not one of these. Once I (re)learned how to use the more functional approach (it has been a long time since my LISP days) I really started to (re)appreciate the power of it. Some may wax poetical about elegance, simplicity, etc.. but that is really what it felt like to me. It sure made it harder to swallow some of the limitations that Java has without these constructs.

    I am definitely not a javascript fanboi, and absolutely agree with you (and the 1E6 others) that hate the toolset for developing with it, but I do appreciate the programmatic constructs it allows. And these constructs are definitely not in Java yet (cause boy, could I have used some of them on my last project!)

    --
    -- The Genesis project? What's that?
  7. Re:Any rational programmer is anti-JS by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Informative

    Javascript has closures and none of the other languages have them

    All mainstream languages except for Java have lambdas/closures (and Java is getting them in the upcoming release).

    For that matter, most languages that do have lambdas, provide syntax for them that is considerably less verbose than that of JS - which makes a lot of sense when you actually start using lambdas heavily. To give an example with fold used to sum a sequence (assuming fold is a member function in all cases, for the sake of uniformity, and ignoring the ability to treat operator itself as a binary function in languages that support it):

    // JS
    xs.fold(function(x, y) { return x + y; });
     
    // C#
    xs.fold((x, y) => x + y);
     
    ' VB
    xs.fold(Function(x, y) x + y)
     
    // Java 8
    xs.fold((x, y) -> x + y);
     
    // Scala
    xs.fold(_ + _)
     
    # Python
    xs.fold(lambda x, y: x + y)
     
    # Ruby
    xs.fold {|x| x + y }

  8. Re:Going down in flames by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Heh... the idea that you would be using every part of C++ and that all of it was good... brought a smile to my place. First of all, C++ is so large a language that practically no one knows everything about it. Second, books like "Effective C++" are precisely about the specific way to use selected features of C++ in order not to get bogged down later on.

  9. Re:Any rational programmer is anti-JS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I guess C++ isn't a mainstream language anymore. Go figure.

    Actually, C++ has it since C++11... but with typed arguments of course:


    # C++
    xs.fold( [](int x, int y) { return x + y; } );

    Of course, both Javascript and C++ are still much less powerful than any variant of LISP.