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by carsongross 3484 days ago
In the vein of "Worse is Better"[1]'s MIT/New Jersey split, my theory is that the online javascript community reflects a lot of what I would call the San Francisco/UI Design attitude (in contrast with, say, Java, which reflects the Palo Alto attitude.)

The SF attitude is more driven by fashion, marketing and art/design world factors and less by raw commercial or technical aspects. This introduces a lot of subjectivity and, as with the art world, snobbery, vicious infighting and out-grouping. Much of the online shittalking reminds me of the various post-war -isms trying to box out the other groups.

There are, of course, many things going on: the rise of the online troll, increasing churn and chaos in the javascript community, bifurcation into the haves and have nots in technology, even the recent presidental election and the attendant insecurities. But this is what I see.

[1] - https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

EDIT: and I should say, I fall victim to exactly what the author describes when I'm going off on one of my YAGNI react/angular rants.

2 comments

I disagree. A lot of technical design goes into JS projects. React is designed in a Herculean effort to minimize DOM refresh and thrashing. JQuery was built to fix very real problems: API incompatability between browsers, and extreme verbosity in common idioms. Babel is a compiler, with all that entails.
The users of these libraries benefit from this herculean effort of very real programming, but are mostly not the herculean programmers.

The users are the community, not the library creators. And the users are mostly, from what I see, the arty designy web dev types.

That doesn't take away from the real problems, or the tricky design or difficulty in building a compiler for the community.

But the people behind those libraries are part of the community.
Sure, and they drive the direction of the community, but they are also a miniscule minority
BTW, never click a Jamie Zawinski link on HN when you are at work...