Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

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)

I'm reminded by @sgrif that `xs.last` is more idiomatic Ruby than `xs[-1]`. That just raises the further question: why on earth don't JavaScript's arrays have `last()`? You don't even have to invent this stuff, committee folks! Just copy Enumerable! https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/Enumerable.html …

The joke's on me: last() isn't part of Enumerable. Maybe you need to take a look at Array, too, I guess, but I wouldn't want anyone to blindly adopt that whole thing. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/Array.html …

That is incredibly confusing that it's not part of enumerable... We should fix that