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   Leftover woman (rosactrl@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 22:17:26 JST Leftover woman

   Has anyone ever write something on how programming languages shape, or should shape the way you think about programming? I would call it the philosophy behind a language design.

   I’ve never designed a language myself, but I (used to) get joy from playing with different languages because of the above

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 22:17:23 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @RosaCtrl Funny thing is, when classes were first added to ECMAScript (in the Flash/ActionScript days), a bunch of enterprise folks made a point of stating that the language had finally grown up and was ready of serious use. What they didn’t realise was that it was just syntactic sugar and we had the same prototype-based language underneath. 🤷♂️

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     Leftover woman (rosactrl@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 22:17:24 JST Leftover woman

     in reply to

     Take classic JavaScript for example, the discovery that I could pass functions as values not only changed the way I thought and wrote programs, but also the kind of things I value when choosing a programming language. It’s not just a feature, but a tool of thought.

     Same with prototypes. After doing a bunch of PHP thinking in terms of prototypes instead of classes felt simpler, easier to hold in my head. So imagine my disappointment when “classes” where added to JavaScript, I ran away from the language. There wasn’t a philosophy anymore, but a pile of features

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 22:31:01 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @RosaCtrl Yeah, modern JavaScript is slightly different but, back in the day, it literally compiled down to the same bytecode.

     I battled this back then, but to no avail :)

     https://ar.al/897/

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     Leftover woman (rosactrl@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Monday, 18-Aug-2025 22:31:02 JST Leftover woman

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral same underneath, but classes don’t behave exactly the same as just switching the prototype. I don’t remember exactly now what finally annoyed me, but I encountered some behaviour that was unexpected in a code base with classes, so I flipped the table