[egwynn]

I think JS is a pretty bad language. It’s a down-and-dirty language that was in the right place at the right time 20 years ago. But if you want to do web stuff, then you absolutely must know it.

In all, that’s no big deal for folks who already have a decent arsenal of languages under their belts. We can just suck it up and deal with the stuff we don’t like while we’re writing JS. But for newcomers, it’s trickier.

Beginners pick up cues from the language (and its community) about how development should be done. They’ll think semicolons should get automatically inserted in ambiguous places, that all numbers should be floating points, that there should be only two scopes for variables, etc. To me, that’s a bad way to get started.

I worry that people who pick up JS won’t end up with enough perspective to reflect critically on JS itself. I worry that we’re expecting the future of web programmers to put up with too many of the hasty/bad decisions that were made in the 1990s. I worry that they’ll jump into a half-baked development vehicle and think they need to start reinventing wheels in order to get anywhere.

In the end, I wouldn’t tell someone NOT to learn JS in 2016, but I would give them a heft warning that there’s a lot more to programming and “software engineering” than JS can offer right now.