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by techdragon 3842 days ago
Good thing there's still going to be a future in non JavaScript web development.

Bring on Web Assembly. Those who dislike what JS has become over the last 5-10 years will just use their own stuff and can finally just ignore JS completely.
2 comments
andrewstuart 3842 days ago
Nothing wrong with JavaScript, as long as we are talking about ES2015.

And even when WebAssembly comes along, the best language to program it in is one that naturally requires asynchronous programming, because web browsers are heavy on network traffic and UI interaction and both those things need asynchronous programming.

Other languages like Python have asynch programming but I would suggest that the pervasive nature of asynch in JavaScript will continue to make it a leader in WebAssembly.

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techdragon 3842 days ago
JavaScript is a perfectly fine language but...

I find the 'ecosystem' unpleasant.

Every time I turn to JavaScript for something, the barrier to entry for non trivial work rises. JavaScript feels to me... As a programmer working 8 hours a day in Python much significant portions of it doing Django, and a few hours a week learning Elixir, C and Rust...

Like the whole world is rolling up a giant katamari daciamacy ball, over the shiftiest powdery sand in an active earthquake zone. I try WebPack and its default behaviour is to turn my sass into JavaScript?! I stick with it and go looking for a plugin to keep the build products directory clean, I find one tiny plugin with a tiny documentation page that barely explains it, so I have to read the source code and experiment a bit before I discover how it works.

Then there is the mess of "which way do you load modules" mixed with the mountain of code that was written for global scope. "Oh just rewrite the code" ... I'm sorry I'm too busy writing new code to waste time rewriting all this other code just because everything is churning like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

/end js induced unhappiness rant

I'm really happy with my productivity pretty much everywhere else. JavaScript just gets more frustrating to work with every time I touch it. :-/ I actually enjoy writing pure stand alone browser JavaScript when I'm not working with any libraries, like I said it's a fine language, it's just the ecosystem that I have issues with.

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stevedonovan 3841 days ago
No wonder people keep churning out new js libraries - it's their attempt to cope with the churn, actually creating more churn in the process.
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TheOtherHobbes 3841 days ago
It's the C++ of the web.
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gotchange 3841 days ago
> As a programmer working 8 hours a day in Python much significant portions of it doing Django, and a few hours a week learning Elixir, C and Rust

I think that you've already made your priorities loud and clear and JS isn't one of them.

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devsquid 3842 days ago
omg praise the day. WASM is days off tho, so don't hold your breath for it or anything.

I've switched to Dart, couldn't be happier. No more confusing JS bullshit :)

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