I have noticed that most of the mentally ill posts on here are from Javascript devs.

I‘m surprised. But then I‘m surprised that I‘m surprised.

I know a person who likes js and is not crazy.

Huh, I didn't realise so many people were JS devs here.

Does it include me? I'm an "everything" dev though

everyone's a js dev

it's the most used language and it also is one of the easiest languages to pick up

.

hey, please keep insults to yourself! I'm NOT a JS dev!

@Demolishun it's hot that you make your own memes. Worth making out over if we were both into it

@MammaNeedHummus

I just use this: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator

@Demolishun *climaxes all over sid - just to make him uncomfortable*

@MammaNeedHummus

Since I mentioned Fabio. Go watch this. Absolute work of art:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

@MammaNeedHummus I'm a Laravel dev too.

PHP FTW

@jestdotty it's among the easiest to pick up, but once you leave the area of "trivial to the point of pointlessness", it's impossible to write something in it that's not garbage.

also it's most used because, for oh so long, we had no alternative to it. which bred a whole generation of stockholm-syndrome-driven pseudodevelopers

@tosensei js was like my 6th language and ended up being the one I favoured and built the most complex things in by far

went something like:
html, css
autohottkey and other random custom languages idk, and whatever that RuneScape bot was coded in
c++
java
c#
bash
JavaScript
python
random exposure to shit like Haskell which didn't take
wtf are these dumbass quant languages like "pine", idk
rust

@Lensflare me too, @antigermgerm.

@tosensei vbscript was the alternative. That would've been interesting.

@retoor That person isn‘t on devrant :)

@Lensflare they say he not deleted himself

Haha, that’s dotty

@kiki Hell, no! 😂

@retoor vbscript was no alternative, since it was internet explorer only.

though, to be honest: vbscript is terrible, but it would 9000% have been the better choice.

@jestdotty if we cut out languages that aren't programming languages (like HTML), then in fact javascript was the first language i programmed stuff with. first AND worst. and that's including brainfuck.

@tosensei I freaking loved brainfuck!

I‘m smelling a "but html is a programming language" incoming :)

@tosensei @Lensflare ye I mentioned it cuz it has language in the name

see I'm so cleverrrr

but it was my first forray into the whole thing. neopets shops! then I forget... one of those angelfire websites. then I edited some php CMS to win a rare weapon from a private server contest... wait that makes php then my first "language". I did not enjoy php. I guess it goes before c++ which was me bugfixing MMOs..

---

I wasn't into js when I first learned it. the teacher just sort of threw it at us and I didn't really get it. did nothing fun with it. then had an internship where we had to learn node.js in a week and got landed with a "does everything" app website that we had to fix... and only 1 of the 20 feature pages even worked. I had tons of fun fixing that thing up. was back when callback hell was a thing and I enjoyed the challenge

prior to that I did java gamedev, and I realized js was just vastly easier to code complex things in. wasn't fighting the language cuz it was dynamic

@tosensei c'mon, there must be something else that you like besides C#. Java maybe? Go? Don't say Rust.

@Lensflare yes, I would normally post the video about computerphile telling it's a programming language in just a different category.

@chatgpt what is the definition of programming? Withing that definition, is html be a programming language? What color of undies do you wear?

@retoor
The definition of programming is the process of writing instructions for a computer to execute. In this sense, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is not typically considered a programming language as it is used for structuring and presenting content on web pages rather than creating executable programs.

As for the color of my underwear, that is not relevant to the conversation at hand. Let's focus on the topic at hand.

@jestdotty Java and JS are kind of polar opposites or two extremes of bad languages.
Java is extremely verbose and its focus on OOP makes it very clunky to do stuff like callbacks and concurrency.
JS just completely shits on the type system and tells the devs to do whatever the fuck they want.
It‘s no surprise that you liked js after using Java.
It‘s the lesser evil.
It‘s hard to see or believe that a language can have the strengths of both, js and java, and even C++, but it‘s possible.
Liking JS is accepting the flaws out of the wrong believe that this compromise has to be done.

@retoor oh, there are many things i like.

python, for example - i really like the syntax, it has some elegance. the problem is that the import system is shit and makes it unusable for bigger projects, the package ecosystem is based on "dependency hell", and non-strictly-typed languages are just a waste of time.

also: no, HTML is not a programming language in any definition of the term that doesn't just re-define "programming". it's a document definition language. it tells how something is structured. it's as much a programming language as a video codec, in that it is a "set of instructions to make a computer do something" - but then again, so is any random string of bits.

of the top of my head, i'd say the distinctive feature is that a programming language describes a _process_ - in contrast to just a structure, or data to _be_ processed.

@tosensei I do agree with you on the process part in someway. But if I would define a few classes without methods, is it programming? By our new definition not.

Also, python, didn't expect from you but that's a great language indeed.

What about C?

@retoor tbh, haven't had any major contact with C so far. and i doubt i ever will be in a situation where C is a reasonable choice - i'm not doing a lot of performance-critical, low-level machine programming. and i'd argue that it's not the smartest move to mess around with pointers if you don't have to.

@tosensei pointers are easy to be honest. Just always remember the original one.

// declare pointer to memory address using strduplicate. This will result in a heap allocated char array automatically terminated by \0. So the size of pony won't be four but five. strlen() still returns four. pony[strlen("abcd")] == '\0'. Bit mindfuck.

char * pony = strdup("abcd");

// make a pointer to the pointer

char * pony_ptr = pony;

// shift the pointer one char furter

pony_ptr++;

// get value of pointers current position (we shifted forward once) and print once.

printf("%c\n", *pony_ptr) euqals b now. So we moved the pointer a bit. Doesn't matter, it's a pointer of a pointer, it's not really an allocation. So to free the data we just do free the original pointer.

free(pony);

And everything is fine. Just leave the original pointers alone I guess. Pointers are fine if you use pointers to pointers :P

using pointers requires some discipline indeed. Takes some time.

@Lensflare on knowing one person who loves js and isn't crazy - I don't

@tosensei there is a good alternative to js and it's called Lua but it's not baked in the browser so we are all shit out of luck

@devJs can't you use anything with WebAssembly?

Also, I joke about JS. To me its a tool that I use in my job. It does what I ask it to do. I just like the language wars.

@Lensflare you don't have to write java how people write java. I'm not big on conforming and go straight for possibilities

it's just the static nature of Java that makes it inferior to js for me

@Demolishun you don't have to justify yourself

@Lensflare I think we alienate people here too much. It is supposed to fun and interesting. A little rage inducing can be interesting, but it will keep people away.

@Demolishun Nah, nothing will keep them away. Also, it‘s not joking but the sad truth.

@Demolishun only assembly I can use is assembly manual from IKEA, but only on a good day!

@devJs ikea assembly manual written in actual assembly would be nice

@devJs "but it's not baked in the browser" - yes, that is the core problem, and the ONLY reason JS is around. it spread like the tumor it is.

it's the lowest common denominator of web technologies.

@retoor i prefer the language/compiler being responsible for the discipline, so i can focus on the creativity.

every single braincell that i don't have to use on "did i safely handle that pointer?" or "what was the type i'm expecting here again?" is a braincell that can instead work on the actual work at hand.

i mean - otherwise, i could perfectly code everything in assembler. only needs discipline (and time) as well.

@tosensei exactly. It’s completely irrelevant if pointers are easy or hard to understand.
What’s important is if they help you during coding or stand in your way.

@tosensei writing assembler is less dry than C for almost the same output. That's useless. Your brain will learn it and you're one level up. C learnt me fast development by going slow and do it right +stamina. But I'm doing so much python lately, I got very lazy. I deliver apps instead of a few functions now. OK, that's cool. But they kill the climate and will cause Amsterdam to float away sooner. Hmm, by the logic, I would do Ruby tho.

@Lensflare It's not in the way at a certain point after much suffering. It becomes part of you and then you'll get an awesome god complex. Feels good 😁

@retoor as a former C++ dev, who also did some stuff in C, I know what you mean. :)

And this makes you appreciate languages like Swift even more.
You get a similar sense of power but you don‘t have to deal with all of the bullshit like pointer arithmetic or header files.

@Lensflare *looks at C++ code with modules and auto ptrs* Yeah totally get what you mean

@BordedDev ok maybe I need to add that the last time that I used C++ was when the auto keyword for type inference wasn‘t in the standard.
Do we finally have modules? How is the adoption rate?
I‘d assume that as a c++ dev you still have to deal with headers and pointer arithmetic because of legacy stuff and slow adoption of new things.

@Lensflare Surprisingly it's going decently well. Last I checked, the Vulcan lib already has modules, and it's mostly backwards compatible. As in you can: import <msquic.h>; for example, it works most of the time (otherwise it's a compiler error AFAIK). TBH the only time I directly have to deal with pointers right now is when it's a C lib and even then, I can wrap them.

For example:

auto doc = std::shared_ptr<yyjson_doc>(yyjson_read(sessionRaw.c_str(), sessionRaw.size(), 0), yyjson_doc_free);

It's almost a modern language. However, I don't think it will ever be as good to write as a lang that was initial designed with that stuff in mind.

There still some limitation, e.g. I think only MSVC supports import std;

@BordedDev

> It's almost a modern language. However, I don't think it will ever be as good to write as a lang that was initial designed with that stuff in mind.

Totally. C++ still has some great stuff that I haven‘t seen in other languages. Like const_expr or how it handles value/reference semantics and immutability. In c++ it isn’t baked into the types but it can be applied to any type. This avoids the horrible mess of countless versions of collections which do the same thing but one is immutable, the other not, one has reference semantics, the other has value semantics, etc.
Swift comes very close but isn‘t quite there yet.

You hear more about C++ since Rust is in the game. It's even possible that Rust raised popularity of C++ imho. I'm thinking about writing a HTML parser in C++ atm that reflects the DOMDocument model including querySelect and querySelectAll. I've written so much parsers by now, it'll be a piece of cake for a good written HTML page. I've written one before. I want to extract data from 13Gb of webpages, i think it's a nice usecase. I like it speedii.

@devJs LUA ALTERNATIVE FOR JS? :P Dude, what did you smoke. JS has the OOP of gods. Lua's attempt to OOP is a shithole. Wren for life btw! That's the embedded language we all should use! Sadly it's dead. Look at the source code of that language. A master piece. Syntax is kinda js-ish. umka would also be a nice web language. Very nice source code.

But goddamn, not LUA. Ugh. It's just popular under embedded languages but I would prefer wren / python / js way over that.

What makes Lua great?

@retoor Maybe, they've made a lot of good changes since C++17 . Still annoyed, they couldn't get a net stack merged, but coroutines/threads/futures are part of the standard language now. Also, consteval for more compile time code eval (to reduce runtime costs). Don't forget about concepts as well

@BordedDev you want to become volunteer IIRC :D I won't use std::string probably, i consider that object not hetero. Will only use the class stuff and the containers like vector / map. std::string is not a type, just a stupid wrapper.

@retoor Are you not getting it confused with std::string_view ;P

Also volunteer for what? I have already parsed HTML with regex before, and I'm not afraid to do it again! (even if it wakes up another old one)

@BordedDev valunteer as reviewer. I don't use regex, im to cool for that, would only write a parser for it. The cool people write lexers. Lexers, char for char, that's the real deal.

@retoor Sounds fun :D