From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-08-24T03:54:26+09:00
Subject: Re: SpiderMonkey / OSSP js?

grrr wrote:
> Its a simple c-syntax like scripting language with pseudo OO like
> features thats IMHO painful, limited and clunky to use and I dont see why
> would anyone want to use it for programming anything but web client apps
> when alternatives like Ruby exist. Hell programming in java would be more
> fun and productive!

-1, Troll (and gods what a blatant one)

Prototype-based OO *is* OO, even if you don't understand it. (I'll admit 
at this point I prefer the Self / IO style of prototype-based OO than 
Javascript's, but that's personal preference.)

If you counted language feature for language feature, JS and Ruby would 
probably end up evenly matched. (Although JS lambdas have some gotcha I 
can't recall now. Something about only being copying closures or some 
such.) I even believe the Prototype library implemented some form of 
mixins, as well as a class-based object system. Interestingly, it seems 
simpler and more straightforward to implement a class-based object 
system in a prototype-based environment than the other way around.

Yes, the standard library is very basic. But it's not that small given 
JS is a language that was designed to be lightweight and embedded in 
other applications, definitely when compared to other languages in that 
field, like Lua or the aforementioned IO. And you really don't want to 
compare the quality of documentation in that field - 
developer.mozilla.org would very clearly win in completeness and 
consistency.

I've always viewed JS as a "sucks less than you think" language. The 
lack of an import mechanism is perhaps the most annoying, but I have 
been known to write relatively clean and modular JS code nonetheless.

David Vallner