Note that I am basing all my arguments on real-world use cases.
Counter-arguments that can't be backed up with an example of use in a
real, complete, interesting, useful applications are invalid. I've
seen the little "language demos" everyone else has, I've seen the blog
posts detailing how prototypes and dynamic typing make some trivial
little example a few lines shorter than it would be in C#, but those
simply aren't relevant to the problems you run into writing real
code rather than micro-demos and toys. So here's my gripes with JS:
a) Magic 'this'. This is this, except when this is that. JavaScript
pushes you to use anonymous functions all over the place, except they
always end up losing the proper context for the 'this' variable, so
you end up having goofy code like "var _this = this" all over the
place and then using that inside your callbacks or other functions.
Some days I swear that the number of functions I manage to write that
don't use a renamed 'this' are actually smaller than the number that
do.
b) 1 + "1" - 1 = 10. Also, "1" + 0 = "10". Yes, this actually has
caused bugs for our applications, where data that's expected to be a
number was loaded from a JSON file as a string due to a bug in another
application, and the result was not good. All our loading code had to
be updated to add a ton of type conversions all over the place. When I
need something to be a number I really freaking absolutely want it to
be a number, not a string or an object or null or anything else. Lua,
which is very similar to JavaScript in most respects, fixed this
problem by just not being retarded enough to use the same operator for
addition and string concatenation.
c) Global by default variables. So even if you take the argument that
dynamic typing is just "easier" because you don't have to think about
variable declarations, JavaScript throws that argument out the window
by making you put 'var' in front of new identifiers all over the
place. And then it silently screws you if you forget to.
d) Prototypes instead of classes. There are very few large-scale
real-world JavaScript applications in existence that don't plug in
their own class system to work around the inherent uselessness of
prototypes in large application architecture. Those same apps make
minimal use of prototypes to extend the base JavaScript types, and
only because JS was so poorly designed that even the two interesting
built-in types it comes with are lacking half the features you'd
expect them to have.
e) Inability to create pass-by-value types. This is a frequent problem
in just about every language aside from C++/D, actually. For those
using JavaScript to write WebGL apps, take a look at all the linear
algebra libraries for JavaScript. In 3D apps, you almost use vectors
more often than you do scalars. Imagine if every integer in your app
was passed by reference, so that "a = 1; b = a; b++" made both a and b
equal to 2. Every little three component vector is a complete full
object. They are passed by reference (the source of almost a half of
the bugs in our WebGL game so far, in fact). They exist in great
quantity, are heap-allocated, and are garbage-collected, which puts an
intense amount of pressure on the GC which can and does result in GC
pauses in even simple WebGL games, unless the developer jump through
ridiculously complicated hoops to avoid creating new vectors in all
the places where it's logical to create new vectors. You can't have
operator overloading, so you have very large and ugly expressions to
do basic operations. Accessing individual components is slow. The
objects aren't natively packed and hence are incredibly slow to push
into a vertex buffer, unless you implement them as a Float32Array
instances, which confuses the crap out of the optimizers of both V8
and SpiderMonkey currently. Did I mention they're passed by reference?
f) No built-in include or require functionality. Seriously, still.
Third-party libraries exist but almost all of them have some kind of
bug or another, not least of which is a confusing caching problem in
at least Chrome making doing actual development a pain in the butt.
g) Dynamic typing. Yes, I'm willing to start that argument. You start
noticing it the most the second you stop writing little Web apps or
Web pages and start writing large apps where you actually have data
that persists for longer than a single mouse click or request/response
cycle: add the wrong kind of object to an array to process later and
get a crash later from a missing method or member in a completely
different bit of code than where the actual mistake was. Fun times.
Yes, Java makes static typing seem evil. No, Java/C#/C++ are not the
one and only way to do static typing. Type inference, implicit
interface binding, etc. give you all the "easy to deal with and not a
lot of keystrokes" advantages of dynamic typing without all the bugs.
The second most popular Web language -- ActionScript 3 -- is
statically typed, in fact, despite otherwise being identical to
JS/ECMAScript. As an aside, I get more crashes from the Python apps on
my Fedora desktop than I do from the C/C++ apps (actually, none of the
C/C++ apps on my desktop crash, now that I think about it). Missing
member exceptions == so much easier to develop and maintain apps,
right?
h) Speed. Yes, there has been some ridiculously immense amounts of
effort by a large number of super bad-ass developers put into the
language runtimes to make JS almost half as fast as a low-grade C
compiler that a single college Junior could write in a few months. And
LuaJIT is in the same boat as JS in terms of fundamental language
limitations but manages to do better than every JavaScript
implementation anyway. People who don't understand what all the JS
optimizations in V8 or such actually do like to claim the JS can do
amazing things speed-wise, but the reality is that all those
optimizations are basically just "try very very hard to analyze the
code to figure out types for variables and then compile it like a
slightly retarded statically-typed language's compiler would do it."
Oh, and there's tracing, but then tracing also works on statically
typed languages (and works better due to a lack of need for type
guards in the generated machine code). Not a single one of those
whizbang optimizations was invented by or for JS, in fact; most were
taken from research JVMs (Java is evil!) or classical OOP languages
(prototypes are awesome!).
i) No IntelliSense even possible. Want to see what methods exist on
that variable you've got there on line 187 of foo.js in your text
editor? Too bad. Go trace through the code until you figure out where
it was initialized, then go trace through the code to find out what
its prototype has on it. And then hope there's no code dynamically
changing the prototype behind your back. In fact, just run it in a
browser and set breakpoints, because finding out anything useful about
the value any other way is basically impossible for any codebase
larger than the toy_web_app.html sites that JavaScript apologists use
to glorify the ease and simplicity of JavaScript. Some code editors
try really hard to do better, and almost kinda sorta succeed for the
really simple cases, sometimes, once.
j) No advantage. JavaScript isn't even special compared to other
dynamically typed language. It is not capable of doing anything
interesting at all all that can't also be done by Lua, Python, Ruby,
etc. None of the JS implementations are any faster than LuaJIT or PyPy
or various other advanced JIT-ing implementations of other dynamic
languages. JS has no plus sides to it compared to other commonly
available languages. Oh, except it runs natively in a Web browser
without a plugin. Which is the only reason in the world why it's so
popular. In fact, it's the only reason it event exists. If someone
10 years ago had just thought, "heck, let's drop an existing
well-designed and well-established language into our browser and get
the other guys to do the same instead of making everyone use this
goofy little hackjob that NetScape came up with," the Web would look a
lot different (better) today. Just imagine the future if Chrome
dropped Python into Chrome as a supported language. Or actually,
imagine this: Google drops C/C++ into Chrome as a supported language
(http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/).
