Re: Re[2]: [stellation-res] Proposed Changes in Bugzilla (#31581 )

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 16:38, Marco Qualizza wrote:
> >> Note: I exclude Javascript or, pardon me, ECMAscript, from the category of
> >> scripting languages. I worked with it, briefly, and would far rather use
> > VB
> >> if only those two were available (not saying much!). I'm still a Python
> >> newbie, but my limited experience with it has been very positive. It would
> >> be interesting to hear other suggestions; please consider ease-of-learning
> >> as well as expressive power and support for domain-specific vocabularies.
> 
> Out of curiousity, what don't you like about JavaScript?

For me, just about everything.

To set the stage a bit... I'm an obsessive when it comes to programming
languages. I read PL specs *for fun*. I can very literally program in
over 100 programming languages. 

JavaScript has the distinction of having *the worst* language
specification that I have ever read. Worse than the 1000 page C++
standard. Worse than the latest CommonLisp standard text, which was
published containing the complete text of the previous standard,
followed by an explanation of how the new standard differed - so to
understand it, first you had to figure out how it used to work, and
then use that to understand how it works now. 

The language is a scattered mess that looks like it was designed
by an undergraduate student who'd heard about prototype based object
system, but didn't understand how they worked. The result is the
most confusing, ass-backwards object system that's ever seen the
light of day. (I mean, a constructor is a function that happens to
assign a value to the magic identifier "this". The delegation 
hierarchy is determined by the dynamic value of a named property
assigned to the function that created an object. Blergh.)

It's just a miserable mess to deal with - it manages to combine the
worst properties of class-based languages with the worst properties
of prototype-based languages, while providing no advantages of any kind
over either. 

And that's just one example of where it goes seriously wrong. There
are others...

There are quite a variety of scripty languages that are highly
compatible with Java: NetRexx, Kawa, Jython, Beanshell, several
smalltalks variants, the BSF, and DynamicJava, just for starters. 
With so many alternatives, I'd rather avoid anything as broken
as Javascript.

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
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