Saturday, June 21, 2014

Embracing the hate : python, JS, node.js,

For a few months now, I have been working mostly with web based code, migrating nacc.nimbix.net from node.js/coffeescript to django/python, and extending the website.

The abomination that is node.js and the ugliness that is coffeescript needs another post in itself. And the monstrosity that is Bootstrap, I've learned to live with, since I just copied the entire CSS and HTML for the new portal.

The first few weeks I had to add certain features to the existing website, to somehow grok through the coffeescript and understand what does what.

The first stumbling block was the "almost but not quite" javascript syntax of coffeescript. I can understand inventing a new syntax if your programming paradigm is extremely different from existing languages, but a whitespace significant, functional looking style is absolutely mismatched for a very imperative, side effect filled application like a web portal.

The second one was the fact that it's hard to tell in a node application which part executes on the server and which on the client. In making it seem seamless across client and server, you have no idea what's happening at the HTTP level.

All that is history however, since I moved everything to django, but then jade/less came to bite me - all the CSS was in the form of .less and all the HTML in the form of .jade files. I tried many tools to try converting the code, but everything failed. Even the server on which the actual node application ran, I was not able to get the jade/less files convert to HTML/CSS due to various incomprehensible reasons.
Finally I found a windows based tool and managed to batch convert everything.

Now I was all set to tango with django, but after programming in static typed C++ for more than a decade, it seemed like building out of green bamboo after concrete and steel, dealing with JS and python.

The saving grace was that the model is simple and straightforward - you have URLs that map to python functions that render the HTML you need. None of that over-complicated enterprise stuff that you find in high level frameworks.

Database ORM was reasonably reasonable, although getting existing database queries to map to django's model is quite a head scratcher. Thank heavens for stackoverflow!

Intellisense is pathetic for dynamic languages.

I was trained under a regimen of Delphi, Visual Studio and Eclipse and expect code to write 40% of itself. Half the time, if intellisense works right, you don't have to look at the documentation for APIs, otherwise it degenerates into a continuous cycle of looking on google for methods you believe "should" exist and often you may never realize a particular functionality exists.

For e.g. who would think that the method used to remove elements from an array is called splice() in JS? How do you add something to an array, is it push(), append(), add() or what? Intellisense, when it works, tells you what methods an object has. However intellisense is theoretically impossible to do perfectly in a dynamic language.

In some ways JS and python are deviously similar, but it's a trap: 
  • Is it ' '.join['1','2','3'] or is it [1, 2, 3].join(' ') 
  • Is it arr.length or is it len(arr) ?
  • Is it for(i in items) or is it for i in items 
  • Is whitespace significant or not? Surprisingly, in JS whitespace is not significant, however, newlines are significant and a misplaced one can cause syntax errors or even code that doesn't do what it seems to.
It's frustrating and annoying....

Of course some things are cool, like the [:] array slicing syntax in python but then there are numerous annoyances mostly because of the dynamic nature of the language
  • Numbers are floating point in JS, you have to bitwise or it with 0 to get an integer, and this is idiomatic!
  • You misspell a variable being assigned to and it simply refers to a new one. The last time I saw that was in BASIC and a it's a wellspring of errors. Silly mistakes and typos should not require runtime debugging! 
  • Variable scoping is weird in JS
  • Pass arguments by value but pass object arguments by reference - But, strings are objects, yet they act like values. The only thing worse is passing everything by reference like in FORTRAN. 
  • Performance anxiety - you can't really get a sense for how fast something is going to run. It may be super-optimized due to the VM, or it may be horribly inefficient. There's a continuous worry about slowdowns (and it is a valid worry, when we're talking like 5 to 20 times slower than C++). I had no idea that using map() is faster in python than a loop. There would be no valid reason in a static language for something like that - iteration is iteration
The saving grace is that the latest ECMAScript 6 standard brings a lot of progress to JS and makes it possible to use a much more saner subset of the language.

Python 3 promises much but since they break compatibility it looks bleak.

For now I simply follow grumpy cats advice :



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