Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

My theory: most hiring absolutely doesn't matter (from the interviewer's side).

Most people will either have the skills needed or the capability to learn said skills. Weeding out obvious poor cases is easy, the remainder is semi-arbitrary weeding out of true positives in hopes of weeding potential false positives. Much of higher education alone does a good job at pushing people to learn difficult things in a short timeframe, with little incentive beyond "getting that paper".

Also, hiring is a lot like parenting, but the bad aspects magnified at least a few times. As you say, barely anyone knows what to do. No one has experience. Almost everyone claims to be an expert (not verbally, but they do act like it). Non-obvious bad choices often go undiscovered; as above, most picks themselves aren't bad (they just aren't great), or something else is blamed instead. Pride, neuroticism and personal bias play huge parts in the decisions.

Worst of all, no one actually reads the studies showcasing most of what hiring managers do have close to zero correlation to anything. I'm really just waiting for a mass study where two companies do an initial vetting, then company A throws darts at a dartboard and company B does the whole job interview shtick, and compare the results 2 years down the line. And maybe add a company C which actually does what studies suggest.

A big issue is that 10 or 20 years ago the steps for creating a webpage were simple: just open notepad (or whatever) and put some HTML.

Today you "gotta" install node, yarn, webpack, react. Then you gotta make a package.json and configure webpack. Or replace webpack with something called "crap". At least that's what all the "for beginners" tutorials that everyone recommends says! Nobody ever said I could just use notepad!!!

But that's not exclusive for frontend.

20 years ago you'd get a random server with Perl. Probably free. 10 years ago you'd get a random server with PHP. You would use FTP and notepad to learn the ropes.

Today you must install some advanced editing software with some plugins, use a terminal, install some runtime or compiler, get some packages, which won't work, so Google tells you to use "sudo" so it works, but that's very suspicious. Stack Overflow says shouldn't be "sudoing" by the way, this is dangerous, you should actually install this "version manager" thing here to install the first tool you installed, so maybe uninstall the first tool, although there's no uninstaller. Oh, and you need this "package manager" tool that install the version manager in the first place. Then you gotta learn to deploy. At this point you're already too old for this shit.

Desktop apps? Good luck with that.

OF COURSE there are simpler solutions, like just making a website with HTML as you could before, or Jupiter Notebooks. But few people today will stumble on that by accident.

I think the problem is that there are so many options, some more accessible to newcomers, some less. For example, I think Thonny is a nice entry level Python "GUI"

But it's really hard to find what to start with from a google search.

>Is node.js giving the author bullshit or did they knowingly step into a field they are unfamiliar with, getting themselves involved with a package manager, a javascript runtime, a browser, and a local fileserver?

Node.js is giving the author bullshit. They were not unfamiliar with the field. They knew what a package manager was, they already had NPM installed. They were familiar with the architecture of the web and one of them had a CS degree.

>Not everything needs to have such a low barrier to entry that anyone can work with it. Who said _that_ is where we collectively set the bar? It's a false premise, and frankly it feels like more of the toxic false entitlement open source maintainers are typically showered with.

I find the premise that the bar should be set artificially high just to keep people out to be toxic, especially with a language like javascript that's intended to be accessible to everyone. Generations of people learned how to code by studying (and ripping off) source code on the web, but now those people have grown up and surrounded themselves with shibboleths and want to pretend they're in a rarified air where high spec engineering expertise should be required just to get past the gate. And that's all most of the JS ecosystem is - gatekeeping.

We're not talking about linking some arcane C program here, we're talking about a scripting language so simple it doesn't even know what integers are - no not even modern JS does - designed to be written in Notepad and run in a browser.

Yes, this should have been simple, or at the very least much simpler than it was. Yes, it should be possible for someone who isn't a full stack developer to be able to run javascript code, even with a package manager, even random code they find on the internet, with minimum effort. Yes, it's actually easier to link and run random C++ code than it is javascript at the moment. Yes, that is a bad thing.

Regarding point 4: more people need to realise picking the right NPM package in the JS ecosystem is becoming a "must-have" skill, but the only way to find the right package is still to be constantly up-to-date with the ecosystem, endless google searches or hoping someone on Twitter can just tell you what's better.

This is why I built https://pkg.land/ (beta), append NPM package name to the url and a list of alternatives will be suggested. See https://pkg.land/colors