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Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy?
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?"
Probably gonna get flamed for this, but my advice.. don't fight it! When in Rome.. etc.
Javascript isn't meant to be done like c++ or Java, so don't try! Think about the mess you get when an assembly guy tries his hand at Java. It's the same deal. It's a whole different mindset, and if you fight it you'll just end up with a big mess and a lot of wasted time.
That said, some stuff does transfer over. You can still go through proper requirements, design and testing. Basic principles like encapsulation and reuse still sorta apply (and are highly recommended imo). Before doing anything that seems like a common use case, check to see if someone has already done it (but don't blindly use it.. a lot of really shitty stuff out there.. but some gems too!).
This depends - are you looking to learn the new coding methods to remain competitive in the workplace, or just for fun?
Honestly if you make a living doing this then you need to adapt. You need to get over your preconceptions and accept the changes to the way computing works. There are millions of programmers out there, if you want to stay employed you need to show that you're adaptable to the new technologies while applying all of the tried-and-true knowledge and experience from your past. It's hard enough to get a job when you're more than a decade out of school.
Trust me, I understand where you're coming from. I hate the inefficiencies of the languages these days. I dislike the general idea of doing anything other than a script in a scripted language. However my (perhaps anachronistic) viewpoints don't have many applicable places anymore. Unfortunately the tradeoff between RAD and proper coding often leans a little too far to the RAD side, necessitating the use of many types of languages and tools that you will undoubtedly not enjoy.
Not only will you be a lot more productive, but you'll be a lot more marketable if you just succumb to the "dark side" that is today's trend in programming languages.
If God gave us curiosity
I'm a c++ / Java guy that has worked with dhtml for around 10 years. The answer is both simple and complicated. For the most part, as you have realized, JS is a very dumbed down Java like language. It is about as strict as PHP (not as forgiving), and you can easily get going in the wrong direction trying to do seemingly simple things (like, getting the value of a select box). For the most part you can fake OO and more or less port over best practices from it's stricter big brother. I more often than not attempt to take the same approaches for JS as I would Java (albeit, it is not always possible or correct in the ways you are used to). Obviously you are not going to be setting up abstract classes or casting complex integers, but the pragmatics of programming are non-the-less the same. In fact, as a simple scripting mechanism over the dom, you shouldn't have to do any complicated data structure work (this is what the back end if for). So, the simple answer is to keep it simple, the complex answer is to attempt to follow best practices and use as little javascript as possible to achieve the desired effect. Just be glad you are not learning this 5-10 years ago, you would be spending half your time testing between browsers and the other half making your JS code look hideous.
First, get thee Aptana for development.
Second, download thee jQuery. I would also recommend jQuery Mobile and jQuery.tools.
Third, dig around in jquery until you find qunit for unit testing.
Fourth, do a refresher on Lisp and functional languages. They say that javascript got it's fathers curly braces and it's mothers lexical scope. It may *look* like C/C++/Java, but under the hood is ActionScript ala Scheme ala Lisp. And it a very real difference which gets played out in copious usage of events and callback functions. As a refresher, the HTML5 paradigm is basically an MVC paradigm, where HTML is handling the Model, CSS is handling the View, and Javascript is handling all the controller functions. Phrased differently, the HTML is describing the What is displayed; CSS is describing How it should be displayed, and Javascript is describing When it should be displayed. And the When gets implemented as callbacks and events. And it just so happens that functional languages are ideally suited for that kind of work (ala lambda calculus, etc).
Lastly, if you're brave, check out Node.js.
My tip is to never let yourself remain attached to a particular subset of languages for 20 years. Absorb all crazy things, because it makes you better in all languages.
Try LISP sometime.
I'm just going the other way. Building my first app in C++ using Qt. Which basically goes like this: OMG you piped a literal string without it being a genuine QString into my label ... KERNEL PANIC! CRASH! 10 bazillion compiler errors. ... WTF?
Of course this sucks. However I'm well seasoned enough to know that when building a non-trivial application, it's exactly this sort of thing that will save my sanity in the long run.
With dynamically typed languages it's the exact opposite. Try building an IDE in JS. It has been done, but it need a solid amount of thorough planning and the one or other hack/stunt. However, writing a little script in JS is like having awesome sex compared to doing the same 'three-liner' in C++ which is like masturbating with a cheese grater in comparison. And still uses 30 lines.
All I can say is go with the flow. Wrap your head around dyn typing if you are not used to thinking in it and eventually you'll see the beauty in JS which blows C++ out of the water in the areas it is meant for.
Keep up with the spirit and good luck. ... And now excuse me, I have to set up my little QWidget 20-something lines of code with 20 typecasts strewn about just to get the bloody label to show a simple literal when I click a menu entry.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have 20 years of C under my belt, 15 of those paid. I currently spend the vast majority of my time writing JS, and I love it.
Back in the good old days, we didn't pick C because of it's great syntax, or the warnings from the compilers (which have gotten much better in the last 20 years!). We picked it because it fast, portable (enough), available, and you could use it to do the stuff we were interested in.
Well, times have changed. JS and CPUs are now fast enough that execution time is not were "fast" usually matters: *developer* time is. JS syntax is good enough. Runtime warnings are getting good enough if you're writing ES5 strict code. Most importantly, if you're writing code for the web, you pretty much have to pick JavaScript. (Just like writing X11 code 15 years ago pretty much meant C++).
Syntax -- "go with the flow, my man". It's juicy, delicious. Don't be limited by the lack of types: embrace the flexibility. Prototypal inheritance is awesome in its simplicity, shallow object hierarchies make for easy reasoning. Make you *get* closures.
Functions are first-class members, like strings and arrays and objects. Sure, their literal syntax is longer than "", [] or {}, but function(){} is still a literal.
Just as the developer who thinks GNU make is some kind of super-shell is doomed to failure, so will the developer who thinks JS is a variation of something else.
JS isn't the new C. It's not the new Java. Or C++. Or Scheme. Or Perl. Or Python. Or Logo. Or BASIC. It's JS.
I currently write a LOT of day-to-day mundane code in JS. Some exciting code, too. I write web pages, validate forms, load modules (CommonJS), and design object exchange protocols and the applications which use them. That's on the web browser.
On the web server, I'm using it kinda like 1995's PERL. I query databases, do CGIs. I can call into POSIX. I write daemons, and "shell scripts". Some week I'll spend a few days and make my CGIs faster than CGIs. Remember mod_perl? Same deal. Mast fast_cgi. I dunno, performance metrics say I don't need to quite yet.
It's a hell of a language. But if you really want to work with it, you have to "get it". Be comfortable with it's multi-faceted layer. Understand that it's "functional", "object oriented", and "imperative", all at the same time.
In C, the Zen boils down to "everything is just a number". That's why string operations are so easy in C once you "get it". In C, the Zen boils down "everything is just a jsval". So, it's IS typed -- everything is the same variadic type. Get over writing reams of code to make your little soldiers walk the goose step, and just tell them where to go. They'll get there.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
for (x=0; x lessthan 10; x++) //sorry, can do lt in comment
{
square[x] = x*x;
}
That's a for loop, while this:
square = [x*x for x in range(10)]
is a list comprehension in Python.
You can write it like a for loop - and I did when I was first learning Python - but it sucks to do that. This is probably what the GP was alluding to. If you really know a language you don't want to read crap written by people who think they're all the same with different syntax. This of course is but a single small example.
Interesting term. I can clear up the guesswork on why the type system is the way it is a little bit. Lars Back and Gilad Bracha, two of the primaries for Dart, came out of the Self group. Self was an interesting Sun funded experiment where they took the "pure objects all the time, all the way down" ideas behind Smalltalk and took them to a new level by throwing out the classes as well. One of the things pursued was a dynamic method dispatching system, that while dynamically typed (this is different than untyped), could get as much mileage as possible out of run time navel gazing to dynamically optimize the execution. There are some good papers describing how cool some of the stuff they did was/is. This group already liked the idea/value of dynamic languages, and have since been involved in various projects all built around this idea: take a dynamic typed system and make it go fast. Strongtalk was what followed. And then Sun bought them back and their work became the HotSpot VM. And Lars built an embedded Smalltalk along the same ideas in the meantime. While doing prison time with Java, Gilad began Newspeak (a module happy variant of Self/Smalltalk/etc). And Lars helped with the V8 JS engine that everyone knows well about. Along with all of this, all the way back to Strongtalk, they've always held that while a runtime system should be entirely dynamic (e.g. no hints required from a static type system), they see great value in being able to express types from a documentation/communication pov within the code. So the type systems, that any of these languages have had (which all share these similar values) have always been for expressiveness only. Personally I don't agree with this, but it's an interesting position that I've always tried to appreciate.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
That would contradict the point of his request. The only real answer is the first one given. Don't try to make it what you know. If you want to have skills in a language, learn the language. I could say that I can write code in Machine Code because my because my C compiler outputs machine code, but that doesn't make it true. If DocDyson learns HaXe and compiles to JS, he doesn't know JS he knows HaXe. His request for a good IDE is a valid one. His request for some good libraries that will smooth the learning curve is valid. A request for libraries that will make JS more like C is not valid, as it will not only prevent him from actually learning JS, but it will be useless in an environment that he doesn't have primary control of. If you want to be competent in JS, you have to learn the JS way.
Stop building narratives like "I'm an X type of guy trying to do Y." That's bound to increase your frustration with what are most likely going to be the normal road bumps in learning to do things differently. Think "different tools and methods for different jobs."
Instead of asking "how do I make working in toy language like Javascript tolerable for *real* programmer like me," you should be asking "how do the very best Javascript programmers do what they do?"
And don't think of yourself as "dyed in the wool" anything. Think of yourself as a versatile person who likes learning about new ways of doing things, because you've got a *lot* more to learn than just the Javascript *language* if you want to actually *use* Javascript. You've got to learn about DOM and CSS and HTTP and web application architecture and security. Once you learn about those things and learn how to actually do something useful with Javascript, you'll be in a much better position to make an *informed* critique the design of the language, popular libraries and frameworks like JQuery, and common Javascript idioms. It makes no sense to approach mastering the whole Javascript ecosystem with preconceived notions about its shortcomings. You aren't qualified to judge yet.
Learning a new kind of tool means learning new kinds of skills and strategies. Some aspects of the tool will seem like major problems with the tool until those good habits become second nature. For example novice Java programmers tend to create code that allocates unnecessary strings inside loops, when they should be using a StringBuilder. The result is the programmer thinks that it's Java that's slow, when it's really their ignorance of efficient Java programming idioms that's to blame.
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Your post reads a lot like all those people who hate PHP. "It has all these things wrong with it!" Well, actually, no it doesn't - because most of them aren't a problem to the people busy using it effectively. JavaScript doesn't have 'inferior' abstractions: it has *different* ones.
I have programmed a lot over the decades in both strongly typed and weakly typed languages - too many to name. I've come to Java in the last few years after a much longer time in JavaScript and PHP (and others) and have experienced the reverse of the OP's problem. But it's only a problem if you let it be a problem. Solving problems in an untyped language has some fundamental differences to a typed language. Get over that and a lot of the perceived 'problems' Just Go Away.
Please get off the intarwebs... your clear and concise explanations of matters is undesired here in this wretched hives of memes and flamewars.
Seriously though, you're totally right. It's different. It's not inferior, it's different.
People who complain about this or that language being a piece of crap because of X and Y, are usually deadset in one particular mode of thinking, and cannot adapt. The question the original author should have been asking was not "how can I make this tolerable", but rather, "how can I best learn the correct way to use this tool?"
To put things in perspective, I was already doing a lot of crazy command-line parsing before I ever started using C. And when I started using C, I was upset, because I knew what I wanted to do, and I could easily accomplish it in BASIC, but C was different. The whole paradigm was new to me, and I had to learn to adapt. I haven't forgotten that, and I try to keep myself from becoming entrenched in any particular mode of thinking... it leads to inflexibly dictating that all else is inferior.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Java has better closures. Clunky, sure, but not broken.
Scala has better closures. Closures you can love.
Haskell has total awesomeness oozing out of its handling of closures.
Javascript is retarded in all ways. It's just flabbergasting that anyone defends it.
Dynamically typed languages almost demand a large unit test suite to minimize quality issues. TDD and all that. If you are going to do that anyway, the dynamic language's weaknesses don't come into play as much, and you get the advantages, like typically needing a whole lot less code to get the same thing done. Look at Groovy, for instance: You can typically reproduce a Java program in half the code, and that if you are not facing one of those problems where dynamic typing really makes your life dramatically easier.
C++ closures are what happens to a beautiful abstraction after it goes through mordor. It becomes an orkish, vile thing more fit to hurt the user and confuse him than to achieve something of good and beauty.
I mean, where's your GC?