I write JavaScript for a living, so this title might be a little misleading. On the other hand, I am also a pretty reliable source when it comes to something I have used professionally for the last decade. The reason I think JavaScript is easy is because I recently dove into Rust. For anyone reading, I am comparing programming languages here.
I still remember the first program I wrote in JavaScript. It was an interactive children's book I did for a school project. It changed pages and animated some images in and out while running an audio track as narration.
I remember it as a crazy experience. The program was thousands of lines of code, most of them copy pasted with a small difference. I had no idea what I was doing, and it was a very painful affair, completely unmaintainable. If I were to redo it today, I think it might be less than 50 lines.
Still, making things work in JavaScript from that day and going forward was easy. Not necessarily pretty, but easy. It is an extremely forgiving language, a true double edged sword. Today, after finishing chapter 3 of "The Book", I jumped into the exercises suggested, the first one being a program to convert temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa.
I am a seasoned programmer, and this should be a simple task. This took me an hour. Something I could write in JavaScript in under 3 minutes. I realize the unfair comparison, but there is a little more to this.
I think my experience with JavaScript feels like it is only worth an order of magnitude less, when trying something like Rust. I feel like a programming novice, with maybe some distant memory, no pun intended, of programming experience.
Having tried other programming languages, none of them have made me feel like a true novice, despite being the one I've tried with the most amount of experience at my back.
It is both fun and exciting to work with a systems programming language. I obviously have tons of work to do before I can start building anything useful with Rust. Luckily, the two languages do share a few keywords and flavor, so it's not all bad! But Rust is hard! JavaScript is easy.
-Trolz
I still remember the first program I wrote in JavaScript. It was an interactive children's book I did for a school project. It changed pages and animated some images in and out while running an audio track as narration.
I remember it as a crazy experience. The program was thousands of lines of code, most of them copy pasted with a small difference. I had no idea what I was doing, and it was a very painful affair, completely unmaintainable. If I were to redo it today, I think it might be less than 50 lines.
Still, making things work in JavaScript from that day and going forward was easy. Not necessarily pretty, but easy. It is an extremely forgiving language, a true double edged sword. Today, after finishing chapter 3 of "The Book", I jumped into the exercises suggested, the first one being a program to convert temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa.
I am a seasoned programmer, and this should be a simple task. This took me an hour. Something I could write in JavaScript in under 3 minutes. I realize the unfair comparison, but there is a little more to this.
I think my experience with JavaScript feels like it is only worth an order of magnitude less, when trying something like Rust. I feel like a programming novice, with maybe some distant memory, no pun intended, of programming experience.
Having tried other programming languages, none of them have made me feel like a true novice, despite being the one I've tried with the most amount of experience at my back.
It is both fun and exciting to work with a systems programming language. I obviously have tons of work to do before I can start building anything useful with Rust. Luckily, the two languages do share a few keywords and flavor, so it's not all bad! But Rust is hard! JavaScript is easy.
-Trolz