[ng12]

> I might get heat for this but...

Some variant of this is the top-voted comment of every HN thread on modern JavaScript.

> For example, the promises API, now we also have async/await. The module system, with require(s), then import/export, and there's browser JS and system JS (node), and npm and now yarn, then your build system, with webpacker, browserify, bower.

Async/Await are essentially sugar on top of Promises -- use them if you want, you don't have to. Require has been deprecated in favor of import/export to be more semantically meaningfull (e.g. with TypeScript). Webpack is the next iteration of the Browserify approach, and Bower is just flat out dead.

All of this happened 3-4 years ago, if it's your job it's not hard to keep up. If it isn't your job there's plenty of guides out there to get you up to speed. I wouldn't expect to be able to jump back into Android dev after 5+ years away from it without doing some reading, I don't know why people expect web development to be so static.

[zaphirplane]

My guess is there are too many options, and ways, to the casual person it’s a lot to learn/compare then choose, for people that don’t care to compare well there is always a bootstrap starter app

[westoque]

> All of this happened 3-4 years ago, if it's your job it's not hard to keep up. If it isn't your job there's plenty of guides out there to get you up to speed. I wouldn't expect to be able to jump back into Android dev after 5+ years away from it without doing some reading, I don't know why people expect web development to be so static.

The thing is that the JavaScript language is so aggressively changed, unlike Ruby for example, that for years, working with it professionally, the only change I can remember that was significant in my work was the safe navigation operator `&.`. The build tool (Bundler) is still the same, along with other tools. Not sure why JavaScript can't do the same? More innovation I guess?

[numbnuts]

After the big dump of new features in ES2015, I don't find the pace of planned updates to the language aggressive at all. JavaScript is still playing catch up.

People will complain if they don't add features. When they do add new features, people complain that they're "bloating" the language or moving too fast. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The JS ecosystem is a different matter.

[root_axis]

You can use the old JavaScript if you want to. All those fancy tools just compile down to the same old es5 you can write by hand if you're so inclined.

[ng12]

> Not sure why JavaScript can't do the same?

We should be celebrating the fact that JavaScript finally has a sane module system after 20+ years, not complaining about it. Ruby had namespaces and modules from day one.

[MuppetMaster42]

It's really not though. If you look at the official yearly releases, you'll find that there have only been a few major changes since ES5 (aka ES2009): Async/await, modules (import/export), arrow functions and destructuring.

None of those are mandatory. They're mostly just syntactic sugar on top of existing features.

Every other change has just been things like new util methods on primitives like the string trim functions.

The build tools are separate, don't conflate them with the language. That being said, for ~4 years, most people's build chain hasn't changed; webpack with a babel plugin.

The problem is that JavaScript wasn't considered a stable and useful language until it really started to hit its stride in about 2009. So all of the changes that have happened are because the community is still figuring out the best way to do builds whilst things in the language are still changing.