Programmer Humor

People forget that crashes are a debugging tool indicating an error. Silent errors can be much more dangerous. C and C++ in particular need to be careful not to overwrite random memory for example.

Yes the consequences for JS failures are less severe and so JS can get away with it, but a crash is a way to know your program isn't doing what you thought it was, properly.

It just so happens that JS is used in contexts where nobody really cares, and errors aren't a big deal, cheap and fast wins.

The REAL problem is that the industry collectively uses JS almost exclusively for shit it was never meant to do. Like you say, it's intended for it to not throw errors and kill your whole web page, because it was only ever intended to be used for minor scripts inside mostly-static HTML and CSS web pages. Then we all turned it into the most-popular language in the world for building GUI applications.

It’s meant to basically go “yeah, sure I’ll fuck with that” and keep trucking.

Yet, it lives in an insulated environment, with plenty of infrastructure to make sure errors do not propagate, with a standard error handling functionality on the spotlight with specialized syntax, and with plenty of situations where it just drops the ball and throws an error.

Nope, not falling for the gaslight. It's a stupid feature that's there because the language was created during a week and the author was trying to juggle the requirement of a rigid and typed semantics that looked like Java with his desire to make a flexible single-typed language that looks like Lisp.

And nobody fixed it, decades later, because everybody keeps repeating your line that the interpreter must always keep on.

My main issue with JS is you can use it wrong, and it pretends to work, and often looks like it works.

But then shits its pants explosively the second you fall outside that.

That's not why JS is a big pile of crap. It's because the language was not thought through at the beginning (I don't blame the inventors for that) and because of the web it spread like wildfire and only backwards compatible changes could be made. Even if with all your points in mind the language could be way nicer. My guess is that once wasm/wasi is integrated enough to run websites without JS (dom access, etc.) JS will be like Fortran, Cobol and Telefax - not going away any time soon, but practically obsolete.

When handling things that are serialized over the wire, you have to do it this way. Yes, you can use typed serialization formats, but in a string-based serializer, there's nothing stopping the other system from sending "0.0000005" on a field that should be an int. If you don't validate that it's an int, you would just pass that value to your equivalent of parseInt().

If you do validate that it's an int, then it still didn't matter if the language has static typing or not. You're doing that at runtime or you're not.

In Rust, doing "0.00005".to_string().parse::<i32>().unwrap() causes a panic on the unwrap() from an invalid digit. However, that's runtime. It's not something the type system can handle statically. The real benefit here, I think, is that it at least forced you to consider that the invalid input could have unexpected results. This is a pretty good reason to be careful about putting unwrap() on everything. The compiler isn't going to save you here.

With this reasoning, would you say everything that a computer does makes sense, because it always follows the implementation? Or am I missing something?