What do you dislike about your favorite language?

DEV is in the process of launching a podcast and we'd love for you to be involved! We're recording the episodes in advance, and this week we'd like to know:

What do you dislike about your favorite language?

If you'd like to participate, please:

• Call our Google Voice at at [phone] and leave a message 📞
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• OR, if you don't want your voice recorded...just leave a comment here and we'll read your response aloud for you 🗣

Thank you!

Comments

[Felippe Regazio]

I have multiple feelings about loving javascript so much, and i dont know how to deal with it. its a complicated relationship u.u

[Isa Levine]

I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE Ruby, buuuut I am SO TIRED of typing all these frickin' underscores for snake_case! 🐍

[ZakariaTalhami]

I can relate, I use python all the time, but I always feel like camelCase flows better while typing.

[Isa Levine]

When I'm switching between Ruby and JavaScript, I always end up writing camelCase for both and needing to rewrite a bunch of Ruby method names. You're so right, the flow of camelCase is just...better! (Which I guess means more efficient to write? Is this really just an issue of number-of-keystrokes?)

[Shannon Crabill]

I didn't think about it until you said it, but yes, snake_case_is_annoy_to_type.

[Isa Levine]

It feels like I always have one finger on the shift key now! 😭

[Shannon Crabill]

i_feel_you

[Isa Levine]

But does your pinky finger feel me? Cuz mine doesn't feel anything anymore 😂

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

but_i_love_underscores.

[Isa Levine]

Me too!.......after they're written. Just not before and during. ;)

[Stephanie Handsteiner]

Doing PHP I can relate, even more so, because it isn't even consistent about it, some are snakes, some aren't.

[Cristian Molina]

I find snake_case a bit easier/faster to read. It's obvious if you think that "_" it's a better visual separator than a case change.

[Jason C. McDonald]

I love Python, but there's one thing that drives me nuts about it: negative binary notation. There has to be a better way to represent infinite leading 1s than undoing two's complement and sticking a negative sign in front. It makes bit-twiddling infinitely difficult.

[Simon Landry]

I love Ruby, but I hate that it's pretty much never used for anything other than web. Don't get me wrong, Ruby is great for web and I love using Ruby on Rails but I feel like the world would be just a little bit better if more companies adopted the language for doing something else. I feel like even PHP is more used for non-web projects than Ruby is and I find that mildly infuriating.

[Isa Levine]

As someone who loves Ruby and would love to do backend work with it for the rest of my life (even though I know it won't play out that way)--I am very glad this sentiment exists! <3

[Omar E. Lopez]

I love JavaScript but I dislike the fact that not support immutability out of the box, also I dislike that it doesn't have a proper standard library

[Ken Bellows]

Have you played with Object.freeze()? It makes an object immutable at the top level (though the properties of objects within that object can still be changed)

[Omar E. Lopez]

Hi, yes I know about it, as you mention inner objects can be modified unless that you freeze these objects recursively but anyway I don't think that this can be classified as immutability imposed by the language itself

[Ken Bellows]

So imagining that it was recursive, would you want immutability to be the default behavior rather than having to apply it with a method?

[pris stratton]

I guess he wants const to really mean constant =)

I think a nice way to ensure objects are immutable is to use a closure when constructing them and only return getter methods, like in Douglas Crockford’s constructor example.

[Omar E. Lopez]

Yes can be, immutable by default but at the same time giving the option to developers of make some value mutable, similar at how mut keyword work in Rust, I like that approach, in this way you can work with mutable data but immutability would be the main paradigm in this issue

[pris stratton]

Makes sense. I’d like that feature in JS.

[Greg Fletcher]

Looking forward to the Dev.to podcast!

My favorite language is JavaScript, although Rust is a close second. I'm just more familiar with JavaScript atm.

Least favourite feature --> function.arguments

Example:

function antiPattern(){

let lol = arguments[0];

console.log(lol);

}
antiPattern('💩'); // 💩

It leads to unclear code and I find it's inclusion in JavaScript a huge mistake. It's deprecated now but I just don't understand why it was included in the first place.

JavaScript isn't perfect but it's very approachable I appreciate the amazing community that exists around it. It's like a melting pot of creativity.

[Roelof Jan Elsinga]

PHP is wonderful and you can very quickly get things running. The most recent updates to the language are amazing and I'm loving all the new things that I can do like arrow functions and type hinting on class variables.

The one thing that annoys me a lot about PHP is the completely inconsistent names and argument order for built-in functions.

Look at this:

• str_replace()
• strtolower()

Why does one have an underscore and the other doesn't? It feels like there is a lot of legacy code still there.

[@nobody]

Clojure ✨ is a true gem, but as a hosted language, knowledge of the environment (.NET CLR, JVM, V8, CLisp Compiler) is required to troubleshoot compilation/ building errors.

Even ClojureScript has a steep learning wall to setup locally which turns newbies away (that and it's ((()))).
Despite the advantages in being hosted, it takes a weirdo to want to learn such a idiosyncratic syntax.

Check out Higganbotthams beginner-aware tutorial into Clojure

[Magnus Skog]

Ruby is my favorite language and what I really dislike is symbols vs strings. We have a dynamic language with no type checking so...was it myhash["foo"] or was it myhash[:bar]? Oh right I know! It was ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess.new(myhash)[:foo]. How silly of me

[Sarah]

Is it bad that I don't have a favourite?