JavaScript Is Not Expressive

Rant Mode: Engaged.

The word “expressive” is often bandied about when describing the features of a language. In the same way that every new CSS framework that hits the front page of Hacker News is “light-weight”, “modular”, and “modern”, everyone’s favourite language will be at some point described by them as expressive.

Whether or not a language is expressive is a relative measure. To be expressive is to effectively convey thought or feeling. There are some languages that are so expressive that you immediately understand the author’s intent without needing to know the syntax. Take the following lines of Ruby, for example:

# "How long ago?"
10.years.ago

# "I expect my list of car brands to include the best one"
expect(car_brands).to include "Porsche"

I feel confident offering up those lines of Ruby for debate because they are indeed idiomatic. I want to also argue that Haskell is an expressive language (and it most certainly is), but I concede I would be cherry-picking from the nice parts and there is indeed some syntax to learn first.

The current darlings of the JavaScript world are React and Redux. Both of these libraries are built on solid functional programming ideas which is most appreciated in the insanity that is browser programming. Perhaps because this is relatively new territory, it seems any tutorial or open-source example you find of a Redux project follows a few of the same conventions. The convention that irks me the most is the practice of defining a constant who’s value is the stringified version of the name of the constant. If that sounds awkward, it’s because it is. Here’s how that looks:

export const ADD_TODO = 'ADD_TODO'
export const DELETE_TODO = 'DELETE_TODO'
export const EDIT_TODO = 'EDIT_TODO'
export const COMPLETE_TODO = 'COMPLETE_TODO'
export const COMPLETE_ALL = 'COMPLETE_ALL'
export const CLEAR_COMPLETED = 'CLEAR_COMPLETED'

What thought, feeling, or idea is the preceding snippet of code trying to convey? We can clearly see that we have six different things here, that in a better language might be expressed as a list of six things.

All of the noise is a result of having to work around failings of the language. We’re telling the language how to do its job, whereas we should only be telling the language what we want. How might that work in a more expressive language? Well, take Haskell, for example:

data Action = AddTodo
            | DeleteTodo
            | EditTodo
            | CompleteTodo
            | CompleteAll
            | ClearCompleted

Here we can see that the language allows us to boil down our code to just the ideas we’re trying to convey. It also doesn’t hurt that GHC will check that all our action names match up, but that’s a different topic.

Why does Redux have the crazy export const… convention anyway? Am I the only one who is uncomfortable with this? Turns out, I am not. The justifications offered up essentially come down to “all action names in one place”, and “please protect me from typos”. If the problem really is one of organisation and you want all your action names in one place, then why not an array of strings?

If the use of const is to convey intent, couldn’t that intent also be communicated with documentation? Or tests? If the argument against documentation and/or tests is that eventually they will become untrue, then perhaps it’s time to drop JavaScript in favour of some language which actually provides the correctness guarantees you seemingly crave?

I’ve heard some of the more prominent JavaScript advocates advise against the use of const because although the intent its supposed to convey is “this value shall not change”, it actually has nothing to do with immutability. Although const will prevent a developer from assigning some other value, the original value can still be mutated.

Perhaps JavaScript is expressive in the sense that it’s effective in conveying contempt for other programmers.

One argument to prove that JavaScript is expressive is that the language allows you to achieve so much with so few keywords. For example, the function keyword is a function, as well as a method, a class, and a lambda. But should it be? I would argue that this is another example of JavaScript developers shoe-horning features onto a language that doesn’t really support them. In the same way that you could build an e-commerce site with WordPress: it’s possible, but there are less painful ways you could live your life.

Upon searching for other people’s thoughts on whether or not JavaScript is expressive, I stumbled on this line by Douglas Crockford:

Most of the people writing in JavaScript are not programmers. They lack the training and discipline to write good programs. JavaScript has so much expressive power that they are able to do useful things in it, anyway.

I call bullshit on that. Amateurs are not able to do useful things because JavaScript is expressive. They get things done because it’s the lingua franca of the Internet and there are an abundance of snippets available online for them to cargo-cult. And that cargo-culting culture is exactly what permeates through tutorials and examples and leaves everyone maintaining convoluted reimplementations of build systems we had decades ago.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this. To try and wrap this up in a constructive manner, I’ll say that if you think JavaScript is expressive and your prior experience is only with PHP or Java, then please continue exploring. There’s a world of great stuff out there which is just so much better.

I will say that JavaScript is many things, but it is not expressive.