And yet, despite its cumbersome syntax, it's still less cumbersome than Java.

Management insisted we wouldn't need to waste our time writing unit tests

So many problems that could be fixed by writing unit tests up front...

Interesting. I wonder how far they'll allow the scripting to be taken, and if people will end up writing what are essentially full AI for their creeps.

To this day, I still can't tell if C+= is a serious project or a joke.

Write a JavaScript parser for a Python parser for a BF parser for a Lisp parser for a program that has a basic structure like this:

int i = 0, j = 0;
String helloWorld = "Hello, World!";
char c = helloWorld.substring(0,1);
char[13] arr;
while(1 && j < helloWorld.length()) {
  if (toChar(++i) == c)) {
    arr[j] = toCharacter(i);
    i = 0;
    j++;
  }
}
for (i = 0; i < j; i += 1000000) {
  int k = i / 1000000;
  print(arr[i]);
}

My comment was poorly worded. What I meant by "under development" is that it isn't a mature language like C++, Haskell, etc. (Go/Swift are not mature) with a lot of libraries already written.

Yeah, but if they'd imported neuralnet, it would have only been 4 lines of Python.

I wasn't aware it was out of beta, but does it have the sheer number of libraries of Java? That's really what I meant by mature. After all, people all said Ruby would replace all other programming languages, but here we are 20 years later, and it hasn't even managed to wipe out Perl (the language it was designed to replace).

I looked into BabelJS, Closure, and a few other transpilers, but since the JavaScript I'm working on at the moment doesn't really benefit from the aspects of ES6 that they're actually able to emulate, I've just written it in ES5.

The main feature I've wanted to use is let, but that simply becomes var. No point in using a transpiler for something a simple find and replace can fix.

Yeah, my compilers course didn't go into String manipulation either. Then again, strings are just arrays of characters, which are just 8-bit unsigned integers with special mappings... It's funny how everything comes back down to integers and floats if you abstract enough.

I don't think anybody in my class got the entire compiler for the language definition we were given working. Passing arrays as parameters is hard.

I did branch out into some of the various compiler optimizations, though. It's interesting how more complicated mathematical expressions get turned into bit shifting.

Just wait until ES6 is fully implemented and you don't have to use var self = this or var that = this because arrow functions (e.g. var x = (a,b) => a + b) don't create their own this reference.

One reason I haven't started looking into Rust is because it's still under development. I want to see how well it matures before I start writing things in it.

I would modify that to say "JavaScript is becoming such an elegant language". IMHO, lot of the really good features (let, class, yield, etc.) aren't actually out until ES6 is fully implemented everywhere.

Your comment made me laugh, because I've been doing a lot of JavaScript these days (working on moving a webapp to AngularJS). It's funny because it's true, though mainly because we programmers hear about all the awesome stuff that's going to be added in the next version of JavaScript sometimes years before it's actually implemented in all the major engines :/

For example: I've been dying to use let in my JavaScript for ages, but Firefox requires <script type="application/javascript;version=1.7">, which no other browser will bother reading, and IE10- doesn't support it (but you find all sorts of people still using older versions because they refuse to leave XP), and all the other cross-browser problems.

I haven't made my own language, but when I was at university I took a compilers class. It introduced me to the intricacies of how your program's statements are broken down and turned into binary. It was very educational.