[kalkut]

JavaScript is for HN what sex is for highscool : those who talk the most about it are those who practise it the less.

If JS devs were not able to focus on bringing value they wouldn't be able to hold jobs, build products nor profitable companies. If JS was so impratical there would not be so many people choosing it over various alternatives for building GUIs, games, websites, WebGL/WebVR, back-end services and so on.

If there is a warning in this story, it is a warning to people looking down on rising languages and frameworks. Those are the people risking to become irrelevant because of a mix of smugness, gatekeeping and ivory tower syndrome.

This attitude is exactly what lost Ron Garret when C++ and Java happened. This also prevented him to see (before the very end of his programming career) that the competition was actually doing just fine with the new tech. You and grand-parent totally missed the point of this story.

PS: You don't make npm "work"

[pavlov]

JavaScript is for HN what sex is for highscool : those who talk the most about it are those who practise it the less.

I was using JavaScript professionally in 1999 and still write it almost every day. Not sure what that makes of your sex analogy: maybe I'm the middle aged guy who goes "free love used to be much better in my day"?

You probably know what I meant by "make npm work" — dealing with the messy dependency ecosystem and the less than ideal tooling.

[kalkut]

I concede that I know what you meant by "make npm work" but I am sorry to hear that you have your left hand busy trying to figure out what's this week's fashionable way to pass around some data in this month's fashionable framework and your right hand busy trying to make npm and Webpack work.

More than 18 years of it must have been such a chore. I am glad this is not how either my coworkers or I spend our time using JavaScript professionally. Maybe I am very lucky, or maybe I just can spot a stereotype when I read one.

More seriously if you still use JavaScript after all those years that very likely proves the point that you can actually be productive with it.

[pavlov]

Yes, you can be productive in JavaScript. But it’s not a magic bullet like Lisp supposedly was for the OP’s author in 1986.

I find I’m roughly as productive in JavaScript as in C. Webpack feels more complex than CMake. That’s a rather low bar for productivity.

[pjmlp]

> You don't make npm "work"

Maybe not, but I did spend a whole day trying to get a Polymer example work at all.