, 1 min read
Does JavaScript scale?
This post talks about how hard it is to debug JavaScript.
In general, pushing the UI to Javascript makes it hard to develop and debug. There are limited tools, the language is too lenient (no objects, weak typing), and testing involves cycling through webpages over and over again.
Obviously, this statement is false: there are objects in JavaScript and some nice features… JavaScript is not too lenient: there are many solid languages without strong typing and they work just fine. But I must say that, indeed, it is quite hard to debug JavaScript. Incredibly so.
My friend Scott Flinn would say “it’s the browser, stupid”… since he thinks that JavaScript is fine, but that JavaScript in the browser is bad.
That’s why, if I ever attempt to do non-trivial JavaScript, I will try to use command line interpreter. The command line is a powerful programming tool despite what Microsoft and Borland think.