What's New in JavaScript for 2019

We should be celebrating the fact that JavaScript finally has a sane module system after 20+ years, not complaining about it. Ruby had namespaces and modules from day one.

Javascript didn't do that. The needs for ads and analytics are doing that. You know what people used before Javascript? Flash and Java. You want untrusted code running on your system, you're going to get very much untrusted code running on your system.

The current situation is a huge improvement over that. No, Javascript isn't making the internet hostile; it's making it useful. Unfortunately, ads are making the internet hostile … but they're also making it profitable, thus… useful. YMMV. People are working on alternatives, it's not an easy problem to solve.

> It's a hastily thrown together language that was rushed out the door by a Netscape engineer long ago, and it shows.

Ok, we're beyond that now. Would the web be better had we had Lua from the get go? Maybe. It'd also be 1-indexed. Would it be better had we had Python? Well, we'd be stuck with shitty lambdas. You know, Javascript is an ok shell for a language that has received a lot of work since.

There is no programming language on earth that can compete with the amount of effort thrown into improving Javascript, ever since that "Netscape engineer rushed it out of the door".

> The 'ecosystem' is like swamp right now, at least to me

It's not. Again, 15 years of Python speaking here. Javascript's ecosystem is active, but the most popular frameworks and solutions are years old. Typescript is from 2012, React from 2013. Both have rock-solid APIs and backwards compatibility. Other popular frameworks also take this stuff very seriously. And the older "progressive enhancement oriented" frameworks such as jQuery are over a decade old and your 2007 code still most likely works with them.

The JS ecosystem is what you get when you lower the barrier of entry to an extreme. There's a lot of crap in it, but you're supposed to do your due-diligence with any dependency, not just in that one language. When I pull in a new library in Python, I look at its codebase first: Is it clean? Maintained? Tested? Popular? You should do the same with JS dependencies as well, you just get more choice; more chances for your problem to already be solved.

Every project has its own little tech stack, each part being filled a-la-carte by some JS framework/library/preprocessor. The server might use express or raw node or Koa, the web client might use React or Angular, styles might be done with SCSS or styled-components, etc. JavaScript might have a different syntax between projects if they're using typescript/babel. There are lots of choices to fit many needs and preferences, and that's a good thing™.

All of these technologies are built around the same language and syntax, which at its core is relatively simple to learn (aside from the occasional type coercion/prototypal inheritance weirdness). This makes learning new frameworks and tooling easy: does it need a config file? Chances are it's a raw .js or .json file with a similar format to webpack.config.js or package.json or .eslintrc.

It's not a huge ask, nor would it be terribly difficult, for one developer to become competent with both Angular and React, for example. And once you've made your choices for your project and installed all the npm packages you need, there's no need to keep all of them updated to the very latest, bleeding-edge releases at all times. Just install patch (0.0.x) updates and wait for npm to warn you about any security issues in your existing packages.

That's why I'm kind of surprised to see so many companies advertising JS jobs with requirements like "Must have 3 years experience with React." Any competent Angular developer should be able to pick up React and start being useful in a matter of weeks, not months or years. Just hire JavaScript Developers, IMO.