I grew up in a town of 40,000 people in Manitoba and one of the things you learn about in a town like that is farmers. Farmers are very particular about the trucks they buy and they usually stick with one brand their entire lives. In fact, a lot of farm families all have the same brand of truck, “My dad drove a Ford, I drive a Ford and my kid drives a Ford” kind of thing. For the most part, all the different brands of trucks, Ford, GMC, Dodge, do the exact same thing. Some do some things a bit better than others, but not that much that everyone needs to buy a Ram. Why do they do it? Loyalty maybe or comfort level. Familiarity with how that truck works so they can fix it on their own. This is exactly how I view programmers.
As I learned more about the online web development community and all the great information that they put out there, I discovered that with this is a lot opinion. Some of it’s well thought out and some is pure crap. I’ve read countless articles and blog posts telling me Python is better than PHP, Ruby is better than Python, Flash sucks, Flash is awesome, and JavaScript is a horrible language. I thought, these guys are successful, they must know what they’re talking about. But the more you learn, the more you realize, these languages are like trucks, some are better a somethings than the others but they all basically do the same thing. So why would these programmers be so defensive about the language of their choice and so venomous towards other languages? I think a lot of it has to do with how much time and effort they’ve put into learning and using the language they’re most comfortable with.
David Arno posted on his blog, Why JavaScript is a toy language. I disagree with him, although I will admit, JavaScript isn’t the greatest language out there, it’s what we have and you can do some amazing stuff with it. Arno is a programmer that works a lot with Silverlight and Flash, and in a previous post, entitled HTML5 must not become the future of the web, he pretty much calls for the end of web browsers as we know it and a move to something like a bigger version of Flash Player. Here’s the perfect example of programming snobbery, he doesn’t like JavaScript and isn’t happy with the way the web is moving. Instead of adapting, he’s just saying the way he does stuff is better and everyone else should be like him. The people at Google seem pretty smart and they’re full steam ahead with HTML5. Does Arno know something they don’t?
As I’ve said before, I use PHP because it’s the language I’m comfortable with and it gets the job done. I like Flash and consider myself an intermediate level developer. And I’ve been good with JavaScript basics but now, mainly because the direction the web is moving, I’m learning more advance JS. When students come and visit the studio I work at, I always tell them, be awesome at HTML/CSS and then learn other languages that will let you get the job done and that you like working with. Pick the technology that you can do the best work with and don’t expect others to always agree with your choice and if they don’t, don’t worry about.
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Hi Mike,
You are unfortunately talking nonsense about me when you claim I refuse to adapt. At the risk of boring your readers, a potted history of my 25 years of programming experience clearly illustrates this. I started out as a kid doing BASIC on home computers. Then went to college and learned Ada and Prolog. Not finding a job in either, I instead got a job doing C then C++, along with shell scripts on UNIX. Later I changed career paths and worked first with PHP then VBScript developing websites and using Windows, which I’d never touched before. Then I moved on to doing C# and AS2, before finally getting my current job, which involves AS3, Java and this year JavaScript and Groovy.
I am passionate about programming languages and believe we should learn from past mistakes to make tomorrow’s development experience a better one than today’s. The idea therefore that JavaScript – which is the most badly designed, poorly implemented programming language currently in popular use – is to become the future fills me with horror. If you wish to call me a snob for daring to stick my neck out and point out the emperor is not actually wearing any clothes, then that’s up to you. I’d rather be a programming snob any day than be a programming sheep who meekly accepts the status quo regardless of its merits.
As to me knowing better than Google: I think not. Google too knows JavaScript is not fit for purpose, which is why they developed GWT (a Java programming environment, which “compiles” to JavaScript) in order to be able to create Google Docs and the like. It was more cost effective for Google to create a full-blown alternative development environment than have their developers work directly with JavaScript. That is how broken JavaScript is and that is why the future must not be HTML5 & JavaScript.
David,
I agree that JavaScript isn’t the greatest language, but I think HTML5 is a great thing and hopefully someone a lot smarter than me will perhaps come up with new version of JS or an entirely new language.
A lot of web developers out there like using JS, so unfortunately, I think it’s here to stay.
Will someone please tell me what is so wrong with js, it seems fine for simple gui manipulation and validation ok node.js is a joke but other than that what’s wrong? I counted the languages I’ve used over the years stopped when I got to 30 they all become machine code at some point so advantages of any are typically superficial