Reply to post: Wrongheaded Thinking

Wrongheaded Thinking

"Roberts, who was not immediately available to discuss the change, told The Stanford Daily that Java is showing its age and that JavaScript has taken its place as a web language."

First of all, JavaScript and Java are the same age. Both came out in 1995. Why is Java showing its age and not JavaScript?

JavaScript has been updated with ES7 and soon ES8, but Java has been updated with Java 8 and soon Java 9. Both languages are continuing to evolve.

Second, JavaScript has always been the language of the web browser; Java never was (or at least Java applets were a failure 15 years ago).

Today, Java is still a crucially important server-side web language for the enterprise. If Professor Roberts thinks the enterprise will dump Java for JavaScript, he’s totally deluded.

Third, if he’s so concerned with Java’s future, why not teach Python instead? It’s a far better language than JavaScript. Easier to learn. Syntactically cleaner. Just as useful (Django for the web), or at least far more useful outside of the web space.

In fact, most universities teach either Java or Python to freshmen (https://medium.com/@richardeng/an-open-letter-to-all-universities-ad98af4a96b3 ). How did Professor Roberts miss this???

Fourth, JavaScript is a deeply flawed programming language. I don’t suppose Professor Roberts realizes this. Its semantics are internally inconsistent. It exhibits horrific runtime behaviour (JavaScript can even fail silently!).

Did Professor Roberts ever see this talk from MIT’s James Mickens?

https://youtu.be/D5xh0ZIEUOE

Here is something else for Professor Roberts to chew on: JavaScript is only good for web programming. Everywhere else, it plays second fiddle to other languages, if it plays at all.

And Node.js? It’s mostly used in a web programming context.

Python is far, far more useful. It’s used for numerical computing, data science, machine learning, natural language processing, Internet of Things, desktop, mobile, animation, gaming backend, operations management, telephone infrastructure, neuroscience, payment systems, media storage and processing, etc. What the hell is JavaScript used for???