All the JavaScript "thought-leaders" have shitted up the ecosystem so damn much. Everything is so goddamn over-complicated it really took the joy out of programming.

A new dawn of simpler tools will come and all this trash will disappear. And not tools abstracting the garbage underneath. This is the cause of the problems.

Everything you think is gold is shit.

React, Next.js, Webpack, GraphQL, etc, etc.

after every specialization comes a phase of generalization followed by a phase of specialization and on and on it goes :)

Well... Because there are no leaders nor is there a true ecosystem in JS.

It was fragmented in the beginning, ECMAScript fixed it. As good as standardization is... ECMAScript is only for standardization and minor evolutions.

Thus it's still the same broken JS core that it always was.

What has happened in the last 15 years plus is rinse and repeat attempts to fix what's not fixable imho.

Be it TypeScript, the insanity of PolyFills, the insane amount of Frameworks, or all the other things falling into the category of ego pleasing "I like it more this way, so I reinvent it".

JS is an industry standard programming language, yes.

But it's also the most broken piece of shit known in human existence.

What's wrong with JS the language? If your only gripes are weak typing and implicit casting then I'm not interested.

@spongessuck

https://evrone.com/blog/...

@IntrusionCM ok "JavaScript bad" anything else? I'm sure he has actual reasons but they're not in this article.

Plus this focuses on JS on the web, not JS itself.

@spongessuck mostly because I was lazy.

Douglas wrote a book called JavaScript "The good parts". He was actually a very vivid defender of JavaScript, so the interview has a fair point.

https://github.com/dwyl/...

If you want short excerpts from the book.

That you make a distinction between JS for the web and JS itself is... Disturbing imho.

Cause it is JS. There is no distinction to be made there.

@IntrusionCM big fan of D.C here, and I have "Javascript, the Good parts" sitting somewhere upstairs. But I didn't quite get an explanation other than "it must be retired" and then him pointing at a theoretical language that doesn't exist yet.

Even then, I was just listening to an Andrew Kelly presentation regarding the state of software and how we need better languages to create low level software (such as languages themselves) and I believe I can see the point. Bun seems to be doing fine implementing a safe alternative to Node.js. JS as a language doesn't strike me as the horror most people here make it out to be.

@IntrusionCM Good read

@AleCx04

Imho the most striking problem is the lack of a standard library. ECMAScript tries to fix this, but it's in my opinion "too conservative".

The problem of fragmentation is exacerbated by the lack of a standard library - most frameworks consist of a highly specific, framework dependent replacement for a stdlib.

This fragmentation is my biggest concern with JavaScript. Most projects are literally dead the moment they're written - given that the frameworks are ever changing and need to make up for the lack of a std lib, migrations are usually *way* harder than in other languages.

I don't think I need to point out the obvious gotchas, like global variables, being single threaded by default, weak typing with aggressive type coercion and the usual migraine that for example prototypes / everything is an object entails.

That's the biggest part.

The other part is imho history repeats itself.

Instead of trying to make something new, JavaScript devs have this nasty habit - even when coming up with *great* ideas - to replicate old content.

For example NPM / node modules and packaging is broken. The concept of having multiple versions per package is just wrong... Node modules attempts to fix this go mostly in the direction of workarounds, instead of accepting that it is a bad idea and giving that up.

I was disappointed that dart gave up and just didn't specify which package manager to choose... More disappointed in Bun that just sticks with NPM for being a drop in replacement.

Drop in replacements are "nice" for a developer, maybe for management to mitigate costs - but the price is that they cannot fix the bad stuff.

That's where we come back to the critic of Douglas.

Instead of trying to add more and more frameworks, which try to work around for example a missing stdlib, or using transpiling, like TypeScript, or replicating the existing package system like NPM...
Rewrite it. Fix the root problems.
Don't replicate what's broken, fix it.

@spongessuck it has no real standard library is my main complaint.
Almost any common thing that almost any language under the sun can do, requires a package in JS. And when node modules is fatter than your mom, it all goes downhill fast.

@ars1 can you give an example of what you'd like to see built in that isn't?

@spongessuck decent floating point precision would be good for starters.

https://pkg.go.dev/std

Some of these as well.

@IntrusionCM Explaining to a web dev why JS is a bad language is like explaining to a flat earther why the flat earth is a bad model of reality.

@Lensflare

Timmy: "But it works..."

"Timmy, if I chop off your legs you can still crawl forward, but I don't think you'd like that way of moving forward... Yet it works, I guess?"