I see, thanks for explaining. I totally get the frustration with the complexity of the web platform. I don't like running into heisenbugs either, and explaining rAFs to someone who is still trying to grasp the fundamentals of coding sounds like a special type of hell to me. That's why I don't use those APIs. They are there for experts who know they need them, and are best ignored by everyone else. It's with this mindset that I say, "let them build the runtime the web deserves". It will be complex, but not needlessly. The complexity will be inconvenient to many until we abstract it away, and we will. Lots of progress already in terms of libraries (React and others) and languages (CLJS comes to mind).
Building a browser should be hard. It's really an OS. You don't hear complaints that Linux or Mac provides too many types of system calls or low level features. Unless you're a subject matter expert, but if you're teaching kids how to code simple games, you start with Python or something, not C or machine code. It's needlessly complex to build something useful using those languages. So if your point is that it's becoming needlessly complex to use JS on the web platform (whether your beef is with the syntax, or the APIs of the platform), why not use a language that removes all that complexity? There are beautiful solutions to precisely these issues. Speaking for ClojureScript here .. (but of course many more langs compile to JS). Moving to this lang will remove OOP, all the es6/7 syntactic madness, and any and all issues related to object instance equality. There is no such concept of an instance of an object in that language due to it's immutable, persistent data structures. Add the ground breaking core.async into the mix, and you have relieved yourself of all heisenbugs related to async stuff. You don't have to worry about what a Promise is, etc .. it's nice.
I get your sentiments toward the practical, scripty side of JS. But I think it's reasonable to say, either practice restraint and _only_ use those good parts, or if that proves to be difficult, it's time to move on to a better, higher level, more safe and fool-proof language. And you can still interop if you want. Either way, core language and platform innovation must go on.
Building a browser should be hard. It's really an OS. You don't hear complaints that Linux or Mac provides too many types of system calls or low level features. Unless you're a subject matter expert, but if you're teaching kids how to code simple games, you start with Python or something, not C or machine code. It's needlessly complex to build something useful using those languages. So if your point is that it's becoming needlessly complex to use JS on the web platform (whether your beef is with the syntax, or the APIs of the platform), why not use a language that removes all that complexity? There are beautiful solutions to precisely these issues. Speaking for ClojureScript here .. (but of course many more langs compile to JS). Moving to this lang will remove OOP, all the es6/7 syntactic madness, and any and all issues related to object instance equality. There is no such concept of an instance of an object in that language due to it's immutable, persistent data structures. Add the ground breaking core.async into the mix, and you have relieved yourself of all heisenbugs related to async stuff. You don't have to worry about what a Promise is, etc .. it's nice.
I get your sentiments toward the practical, scripty side of JS. But I think it's reasonable to say, either practice restraint and _only_ use those good parts, or if that proves to be difficult, it's time to move on to a better, higher level, more safe and fool-proof language. And you can still interop if you want. Either way, core language and platform innovation must go on.