Re: The Case for Javascript

I don't avoid JavaScript because of security concerns or because I personally run an older browser. I avoid it because JavaScript is a suck ass language. I have coded some reasonably large chunks of it for different jobs, and what I learned is that

every browser does it just a little bit differently
new browser releases will often break your code
browser makers will not tell you all the details of how their version differs
you will have to test it on every OS/browser combo you intend to support
even if you get everything right, your pages will sometimes fail for certain users with no apparent reason

I have never wasted so much time debugging anything as I have with JavaScript, and it's maddening because the fault lies in different browser implementations rather than in your code. Combine that with the horrible things most people use JavaScript for and it's hard to see what's so good about it.

One final note about the browser upgrades: commercial sites have to support the browsers that their users want to use. You can't just tell your potential customers that they must download the latest gigantic browser release for the privilege of shopping in your on-line store. Yahoo generally does a nice job of walking the fine line and using JavaScript only where it is useful. Even so, their pages sometimes fail for me in the latest browsers because of JavaScript problems.

Comment on Re: The Case for Javascript

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Re: Re: The Case for Javascript by broquaint (Abbot) on Nov 18, 2002 at 17:32 UTC
I avoid it because JavaScript is a suck ass language. Don't you mean most browsers' implementation of JS is suck ass, or more to the point, the DOM API for different browsers? In my experience, all the browsers implement the language in a similar fashion and the only inconsistency between browsers might be which version is implemented (i.e JS 1.2 vs JS 1.5). I can't vouch for the various DOM APIs as I have mostly avoided them due to a particular distaste for DHTML, but from my brief experiences the DOM API differs from IE to Netscape to $other and is quite hellish to get anything working consistently across browsers. I'd also have to say Javascript as a language is quite wonderful indeed. Its got your OO, first-order functions, lexical scoping and as of later versions there is regex support and exceptions (1.3 and 1.5 respectively). So quite perl like in a lot of ways with its polymorphic variables, open-ended OO system and many many clueless hackers (although the JS 'community' doesn't have anywhere the same amount of clued-up hackers as perl does unfortunately). HTH `_________ broquaint`	[reply]
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