The 2018 State of JavaScript survey is out. They got 20,000 responses and have some delicious, delicious data. I'mma thread in some highlights:

Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.

Java was first released in mid-1995, just 6 months before JS.

By 98, when I went to college, Java was already used for all the first level courses in the CS program.

How did it catch on so quickly (just 3 years) to shift university curriculum, which is usually so slow/behind?

I wonder why Java was so respected and JS was not? Why/how was Java already seen as such a stable and mature language?

Not just Java, other languages (like python) were also released around/near 95, and also seemed to get to "mature" respect status. much quicker.

I bring all this up because my impression of Java in 98 was that it had been around "forever" (as had C++ first developed in 79, but not standardized until 98!), but that's not. true at all. These were all new languages around the same time.

I'm sure the language designs had different merits, and the target applications meant a different perception and reception, but...

it sure seems like the industry (and academics) just decided Java and C++ were the stable mature ones and langs like JS were toys.

BTW, before you assume JS was nascent/immature b/c the web wasn't much of a thing yet, remember that JS was actually released as LiveScript on the server before it was released in a browser. So "server-side JS" was always part of the story, not just Node 15 years later in 2009.

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".

@zkat__ I'm in the position that I actually find npm / yarn the best ecosystem. Whenever I use something else I always end up stubbing my toe into something thats missing / feels wrong.

Ex. Cargo seems to neither have a concept of devDependencies nor peerDependencies.

I also can't understand why it wouldn't have an "add" command to add a new dependency. And I'm no fan of Toml, json is greate (easy to parse and build tooling around), and the better option in my opinion would be json5.

C / C++ seems to just not have language package managers. The linux / bsd crowd seem to have decided that the system package manager also should be the language package manager. Which might have been fine if every Linux distro used the same system package manager.

Instead we end up with a N x M problem. Where we have a bunch of different operating systems and they all support multiple system package managers. So there's no easy way of distributing, referencing and updating C / C++ packages.

It is also my opinion that the compiler / runtime should be a package dependency. I don't like Rust's split between rustup and cargo (they should have been one tool). Similarly it would be better if you added Node as a dependency to package.json, that way we wouldn't need NVM.