Ask HN: Help, I'm Drowning in JavaScript

It does and it sets a good perspective on the problem at hand. Thank you.

> I do not understand his code

I believe that's your main problem. You are seeing a foreign language kinda close to what you know and expect to understand it right away (while it's the same "Javascript", using different writing ways is more akin to another dialect). It takes a bit of time and practice to familiarize yourself with it. Try to decompose it until you become fluent. When you learned to read, you would read a word one letter at a time. Do the same: read the code one operator at a time, until you understand what's going on and how they work together.

For example, a ternary is just a compressed if/else with a different syntax. An arrow function is just an inline function with a different syntax. etc...

> I do not get Typescript

Typescript is Javascript with type safety. In Javascript, if you pass a number to something that expects a string, it will convert without any complaint. Typescript will complain that it's the wrong type. You can go much further than this with complex types that have to be passed correctly.

> thousands of dependencies, while nobody cares, that 20 to 100 of them are deprecated

Some people care, but for most dev, it's a black box that just works. It's frankly not something to worry about when starting.

> I do not understand, how this whole eco system works

If I had to sum it up, it would be building on the shoulders of giants, over and over again, at a break-neck speed, valuing improvements over backward-compatibility. I'm personally not a fan of it, but that's how it is.

You're not alone - it's nuts how much JS has changed over the last decade.

I don't know if I can offer any suggestions beyond just Googling syntax you don't understand and experimenting with it until you feel you understand it. From there it just a matter of time before you can glance your eye over the code and understand what it's doing without needing to decipher every line. I just want to say you're not alone. I think most frontend devs have gone through something similar at some point over the last decade - I know I have.

As for deprecated dependencies, that's a huge problem. Senior devs generally do care and will be selective around dependencies. One of the problems is that the ecosystem is evolving so quickly. Libraries come into and out of fashion almost over night so frequent maintenance is needed to keep dependencies up to date. My guess is that either devs are not putting enough thought into what dependencies they're using, or your not currently assigning enough time as a team to review & maintain your existing dependencies - this is definitely something worth raising with your team imo.

The last thing I'll say is that the use of ternary operators are something I'm very critical of and it's interesting that you mentioned them in your post. A lot of devs seem to have this mindset that if you can convert 5 lines of code to 1 or 2 that's always a good thing, but compressing 5 lines of code to 2 often comes at the cost of clarity and readability. It sounds like you might need to think about coding standards with your team. Is part of the problem here that the team is writing confusing / messy code, and it's that coupled with your lack of knowledge of modern JS that's resulting in the stress you're feeling here?

to sum it up our dude here wasnt properly onboarded on the tech stack the team uses before he is given any tasks.

How to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. JavaScript is fairly complex language and skipping a few parts in foundation can lead to not understanding the rest of it. You also mentioned regex,which is a whole separate piece to learn.

Here's what I suggest:

1) Get the language basics really well.Like really well.

2) Move on to more complex concepts,again don't skim read, but do again and again and again.

3) learning from code written by a more experienced colleague may not be the best option. He may have a certain style, approach and etc. If you can't understand the code , you won't learn much from it.

4) Get yourself all ' you don't know JS' series and devour it. The books aren't easy read if you really try to understand the concepts but way better than some random guy on YouTube covering the subject in 2 min video.

5) I've recently did a private job with Regex,which I barely know. It was painful.. but it gets easier. Again, start with basics and build up, instead of trying to run complex queries and not fully understanding them.

6) Be methodical. Don't jump from one tutorial to another,from one book to another. Read one book,do all the exercises, only then move to something else.

P.S: Regexing HTML is by far the worst thing a dev could get to do, that's why most would advise against it. Don't be hard on yourself.

Good luck!