Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

So in every *other* programming language, we can add a simple function like Ruby's Hash#merge, and it's fine, and no one bats an eye. But in JavaScript, everyone gets ten times as excited, produces 100 times as much writing and discussion... and support for it is unpredictable.

Because Twitter tends to read criticism of anything JS-related as a moral condemnation: this has nothing to do with the people involved. We locked ourselves into a monoculture built on top of a language that wasn't designed. This is about the best we could've expected given that.

It's strange that the accepted solution is "throw another compiler in front of the compiler" in the form of Babel... which itself is a monoculture. Solve the monoculture by layering another monoculture over it. Doesn't seem right.

Another similar example. How do you spell "get the last element of an array"? Python (as of 1990): xs[-1] Ruby (as of 1995): xs[-1] JS (also as of 1995): xs[xs.length - 1] JS (as of 1999, probably an uncommon idiom): xs.slice(-1)[0] JS (as of 2015): var [x] = xs.slice(-1)

Every JavaScript version, past and current, is obviously worse than negative indexing, which existed before JavaScript was rushed out the door. (It was rushed out by Netscape as a play to slow the adoption of Sun's Java applets.) Why don't we adopt the 28-year-old simple thing?

This doesn't look like a huge issue when considering single values. But what happens in real life? Python or Ruby: g(f()[-1]) JavaScript, 1995: var xs = f() var x = xs[xs.length - 1] g(x) JavaScript, 1999: g(f().slice(-1)[0]) JavaScript, 2015: var [x] = f().slice(-1) g(x)

FWIW I think most folks would consider `g(f.last)` more idiomatic in Ruby (not sure about Python). I've personally never found `-1` meaning end of the array particularly obvious or intuitive

(Python lacks no last(). Ruby/Python are opposites in terms of core type method bloat.) Ruby: > [].methods.length => 177 Python: >>> len(dir([])) 45 But only 9 of those are intended for direct calls (don't begin in "_")! >>> len([m for m in dir([]) if not m.startswith('_')]) 9