The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
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Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#2When a language becomes stable, it also begins to lose popularity. (This is widely discussed).
Javascript is the only language that has continued to grow forever without becoming an "old" language in dev mindset.
One reason is the constant churn of tooling, another is the immaturity of everything, so every generation of devs have a place to add something.
Overall JS gains more than it loses.
This is similar to the concept that the first buggy language to capture mindshare will eventually fix its bugs and leave the initially more perfect competitors behind.
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#3It is a lost cause to rationally try and sort out what if anything is chronically wrong with js, ruby, haskell, c (or any language of choice). They each have their pros and cons, and have evolved differently for different reasons. Since programming languages many times (seemingly) are like a dear spouse to its disciples such discussions generally devolve into endless and meaningless comparisons, if not worse.
The article obviously panders to ruby sentiments, and the javascript experience can obviously be frustrating to that community, as might ruby to a mainly javascript developer. Might we just leave it at that?
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#4> From backend ORMs and headless APIs to frontend site generators, package managers, and build tools—it's a miracle any of it actually works properly in production!
I think the issue is clear from this first sentence. Why are there any of these things in javascript?
The marvel is that in 2021 such a sentence can be written -- that these things are immature seems both obvious and to miss the point.
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#5When a language becomes stable, it also begins to lose popularity. (This is widely discussed). Javascript is the only language that has continued to grow forever without becoming an "old" language in dev mindset. One reason is the constant churn of tooling, another is the immaturity of everything, so every generation of devs have a place to add something. Overall JS gains more than it loses. This is similar to the co…
Worse is better, it still seems.
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#6I did web dev for a few years using Angular + various other tools, and yes, it was nightmarish.
I had to come back to it briefly recently. But using "boring" Typescript, esbuild and preact, I have to say the experience was an immeasurable improvement. Verging on pleasant even. Everything was well-documented with strong Stackoverflow coverage.
So, boring > shiny
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#7IMHO, JS is has more mature parts than any other language. It's fast, stable, portable, practical and for every problem you could imagine, there's an answer on Stack Overflow, immense community, easy to learn (while hard to master, like the English language). The problem is, the popularity also brings huge amount of immaturity. So, it also has more immature parts than every other language too! People keep adding new libraries, trying to promote them, and most of them are indeed beginners, because when most people start programming, they do learn JS mainly, or as an addition.
Yeah, JS has a very small standard library which exacerbates the problem but if you look at the amount of libraries that do what they do best and are stable, I guess no ecosystem is anywhere close.
Beginners should just follow the happy path, and it almost always works fine. People can use "create-react-app" or "express.js" or "lithtml"... But just learn the language too. I use next.js myself and am surprised how everything just works. I can't say the same for many C# frameworks (and from Microsoft nonetheless).
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#8All this complaining about churn is ignoring what the churn stems from.
There's constant, incredible evolution in the JS ecosystem. Some examples :
* New syntax that makes JS so much more expressive than before, like arrow functions, spreads and null operators
* Typescript has made development so much better and reduces the need to unit test structure
* React was a paradigm shift when it came. React hooks is another paradigm shift, I've written code in the last few months that would have been so much harder to write and been much more buggy without hooks
I spend at most a few hours per month upgrading packages and dealing with churn. It's a small price to pay
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#9IMHO, JS is has more mature parts than any other language. It's fast, stable, portable, practical and for every problem you could imagine, there's an answer on Stack Overflow, immense community, easy to learn (while hard to master, like the English language). The problem is, the popularity also brings huge amount of immaturity. So, it also has more immature parts than every other language too! People keep adding new…
... happy path...
Having come back to JS recently after years away I feel that typescript should be the recommended way of interacting with JS. It makes it much easier to write code with reduced bugs.
Re: The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript
#10All this complaining about churn is ignoring what the churn stems from. There's constant, incredible evolution in the JS ecosystem. Some examples : * New syntax that makes JS so much more expressive than before, like arrow functions, spreads and null operators * Typescript has made development so much better and reduces the need to unit test structure * React was a paradigm shift when it came. React hooks is another…
Isn’t React slow, only able to manage tables of a few dozen rows before slowing down to hell, hence starting the trend of tables paginated by 10 rows only? Isn’t that the cost of hooks?