”JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days”
A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work.
(yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself)
Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!
I think it's an exaggeration to say that design flaws in JavaScript are "horrible" and that they have caused billions of hours of work. Of course there are warts in the language (e.g. everything gets cast to a string) but similar design issues have plagued other languages as well. It's not like JavaScript is unique in providing footguns.
And the language is operating in a different context than most other languages (prioritizing not breaking at all costs), so it is really hard to fix defects. That context would have been impossible to foresee.
I agree. We all know that JS was not perfect (that's why we had to stick to "the good parts" for several years). But I think it was still elegant and concise and got the job done. Prototype based OOP, event-driven, etc were all very good decisions.
And also, the argument that "made in 10 days and is horrible" is counter-factual. We don't know if we could have gotten a better language if they spent 1 year or 5 years. The achievement is impressive.
It's only rushed if you think Brendan can see the future, and knows that there will be billions of hours of work done using the language he is creating.
Apollo 8 had a ton of flaws in it as well. But for the most part it did the job that was intended for it. If the world decided to keep flying Apollo 8 for the next 30 years, I'm sure even more flaws would show up, but I wouldn't exactly blame the original designers.
Haters gonna hate. I love JS for small-ish projects after 25 yrs of C/C++ and ~10 year of python. I get shit done 10x to 20x faster than I'd ever get it done in most other languages.
I can't remember ever running into JS's quirks. If I did it was no different than any language's quirks.
A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work.
(yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself)
Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!