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- cross-posted to:
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Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.
Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.
I mean, sure, but the JS we write today is quite a bit different than the JS he designed.
It was also heavily influenced by a number of other languages, and borrowed tons of libraries from them. The entire number and math system is just a straightforward implementation of IEEE 754.
Yes, but all of the quirks it had back then are still there, for backwards compatibility
Yeah, but only kind of. It depends if you’re using the new syntax. Within new language constructs (like classes and modules), code runs in strict mode without having to use
"use strict". It gets rid of some of the annoying quirks.Yeah, but using doubles for everything is its own downsides e.g. it’s why JSON “can’t” store 64bit integers for starters.
They did add the
BigIntclass recently, which annoyingly you can’t use with JSON because it requires specialized handling (Because of the aforementioned issue with JSON).(So you “can” store 64bit integers in JSON, the spec just says not to, so people just ignore the spec. You just then run into silent truncation issues with clients that do follow it, like browsers.)
Safe json handling requires that all properties are stringified anyway and you cast them to their correct types (because json sucks and you can never tell what someone will put in there anyway).
Yeah, I actually really don’t like JSON. It looks simple but actually isn’t, that’s a bad combo.
CBOR is much nicer, but annoyingly they made their human readable debug version of it similar enough to JSON that people assume it’s just a binary form of JSON, it isn’t.
Yeah, I completely agree. It’s straightforward, but it’s got a lot of downsides. Everything always takes eight bytes. Even if you’re just storing 0 or 1.
It makes handling numbers a lot simpler in most cases, though, and simplicity was the goal of JavaScript. I just wish there was a better solution than typed arrays.