the hardest exam question

You'll find an npm package to help you count up to 2.

(I recently learned - maybe here - that the is-even package has over 170k weekly downloads)

What's even wilder is if you look at the code of that package, all it does is include the is-odd package and then return !is-odd. And the is-odd package isn't much better, it does some basic checks on the input and then returns n % 2 === 1.
- I thought I was missing something. JS is one of my main languages and I always just write the is-odd function myself since it's like 10 characters. It boggles the mind that is-even has 176k weekly downloads
- I’ve always looked at stuff like that as much more along the lines of performance art than anything else.
Oh boy, this actually made me laugh out loud
This must be a "hold my beer" kind of joke and someone wanting to see how far they can take it.

it's easy to make fun of
it makes every other programming language look better in comparison

You can call it "Java" to enrage other programmers
You can compare numbers against strings without wasting time converting them

If you're living in 2002 and not using the strict equality operator, that's on you
- But what if I don't want strict comparison? What if my frontend contains a text field for a numeric input and I wanna manually check against each possible valid input value if (input_val == 1) {...} else if (input_val == 2) {...} else if... without having to convert it first or check that it's actually a number or fix my frontend?
  (I'm sure there are valid use cases for non-strict comparison, I just can't think of one right now)

It's not PHP.
I don't know. I didn't think I'd get this far.

PHP has gotten really good over the past few versions, actually. Lots of really great stuff has been added, it feels like it resembles rust more every release lol
- PHP10: We now allow interop with Rust!
  PHP11: We now allow writing code directly in a .php file and compile it with rustc.

It has the simplest multi-threaded implementation: no threads!
You can goof off while your build system takes 20 minutes to rebuild a non-compiled language

Job security
its not COBOL

It's* not
- If you are understood buy you're audience, you have spoken correctly. Correcting someone's grammer is pointless

I am forced to try to get a JS certification.

I am reaching the end of my rope, and starting to think of maybe putting my neck into one.

Isaac Newton said that we see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Javascript is like standing on the shoulders of dwarves with brittle bone disease.

Ubiquitous; insane amount of libraries and probably some of the best documentation of any language
JS lambda function syntax is nice

It runs in browsers
If you hate your co-workers, then they will also feel your pain.

It runs in the browser
Web developers know it already so we might as well

1 - Easiest way to run a script in your browser
\ 2 - Always finds its way if inputs are bad
\ Nan - undefined

It leads to typescript

You get surprises from npm

You get suprises from npm
I spent way too long today figuring out why my app was doing something that it's NOT supposed to do on weekends.
I read Luxon's docs (pretty cool lib tbh) again and again, and tried everything I could think of to get isWeekend to return a sane result.
Turns out I was pulling a somewhat older version of Luxon, where isWeekend didn't exist. In any sane language, I expect I'd get a huge warning about a property that doesn't exist, but alas...
Typescript helps me keep my sanity, but juuuuust barely.
- Weren't you getting runtime errors for the function not being found?

Is available to be used in website scripting.
Not quite as full of footguns as PHP (although it is close).

The part that always gets me is when people choose Js for the backend. Like I get that it's the default thing that works on the frontend, so there's some rationale why you might not want to transpile to it from another language. On the backend though, there are so many far better option, why would you willingly go with Js, especially given that you're now forced to do all your IO async.

Server side rendering looks like it could be useful. I imagine SSR could be used for graceful degradation, so what would normally be a single page application could work without Javascript. Though, I've never tried SSR, and nobody seems to care about graceful degradation anymore.
- Most pages tend be just documents and fairly simple forms. Making SPAs and then having to worry about SSR is just making a Rube Goldberg machine in most cases. I think something like HTMX is a much better approach in most cases. You keep all your business logic server side, send regular HTML to the client, and you just have a little bit of Js on the frontend that knows how to patch in chunks of HTML in the DOM as needed. Unless you have a highly interactive frontend, this is a much better approach than making a frontend with something like React and adding all the complexity that goes with it.
You really should be doing your IO async. Do you specifically mean callback hell?
- No I meant having to do async as opposed to having threads like you would in Java for example. In vast majority of cases a thread pool will work just fine, and it makes your code far simpler. Typically, Java web servers will have a single thread that receives the request and then dispatches it to the pool of workers. The JVM is then responsible for doing the scheduling between the threads and ensuring each one gets to do work. You can do async too, but I've found threads scale to huge loads in practice.

await and async

Over what?

Death by wasps

Browsers love it!

Practically anything you write will execute without all that scope and well formed statements nonsense.

Mind you, number 2 is also its biggest flaw as well, but…

God people it's getting old

Bro, I'd prefer C# or go for the http sever
- Web assembly!!!1

Its not java

It at least feels slightly little bit like lisp.
Shit I'm f*ed

.. ah right, it runs on any browser. Lame

It runs in browsers. It… isn’t poop? I don’t know. I’m all out of ideas.

It… isn’t poop?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLikP6BDH5w
- Well, there's a link that's staying blue.

hmm, let's see.

It's not java.

It's also not a scripting language.

also to the repeat grammar nazi in the comments here, hi, "its"

It’s not a scripting language?
- Depends on how you define "scripting language".
  Older techs remember when it was only browser-based and they thought of, and perhaps still think of, "scripting languages" as something that would run from some command-line or another. Starting a GUI browser to run a mere script was a ridiculous concept. (There was also that JavaScript had no filesystem access. At least initially. And then it became a gaping security hole, but I digress.)
  Today, there exist command-line accessible versions of JavaScript but even there (I figure) most people wince and choose anything else instead. Maybe even Perl.
  But another definition of "scripting language" is "(any) interpreted programming language" and where it runs is unimportant.
  From that perspective, sure, JavaScript qualifies. And so does QBASIC.
It’s also not a scripting language.
It definitely is a scripting language.
hello-world.js:
javascript

#!/usr/bin/env node console.log("Hello world");
Your favorite command line tool:
bash

chmod +x ./hello-world.js ./hello-world.js
You just need to install npm, eg via apt-get install npm.
- everything is a scripting language if you try hard enough.

You can make minecraft mods

that's java
- There'll be a modloader in the next 5 years that will have you load .js scripts as mods
- Everyone know JavaSript is a Java, but you don't have to compile, so you script in it.
  ^/s