[Fellshard]

Javascript is this on steroids: It wants to be inspired by Lisp, by Self, by Java, and the resulting melange smells like every paradigm while fitting none of them. Trying to write applications in Javascript is trying to corral the minds of hundreds of people who each had a different idea of what Javascript is and what it does and what it wants you to do. The resulting system is doomed to total incoherence.

[_bxg1]

JavaScript started out as a sort of "Java-flavored Scheme", actually

However, I'd say that modern JavaScript - the language - is much more like C++ than Lisp. It isn't a void of shepherding, so much as shepherding-by-committee.

However, due to how easy its ecosystem has made package management (in contrast with C++), much of that quagmire has been papered over with much more strongly-opinionated (shepherding) frameworks and dialects. This hasn't completely solved the "C++ problem", but it's gone a long way towards mitigating it. Working in modern JavaScript may be wildly different between frameworks, but it's reasonably consistent between projects that use the same frameworks.

[DeathArrow]

In other programming languages there is a consistency between frameworks and a default way to do things: there's no shitload of frameworks each reinventing the same wheel.

Some things are easy doable without frameworks.

In Javascript land you don't learn the language, you learn frameworks. And, some "JS frameworks" like Angular do not even promote JS, due to how terrible the language is.

If your current framework goes out of fashion in favor of the next shiny thing, you are out of luck.

I am unfortunate enough to having had to learn one of JS frameworks because our web apps are APIs in the backend and I have to do the frontend too and people who started the projects were fans of a particular JS framework.

For upcoming projects I'll use Blazor after it becomes production ready, no more JS frameworks for me.

I don't dislike JS, I quite enjoyed old-school ES6 + jquery. I even like Vue because is very customizable. I have a strong dislike for big opinionated frameworks like Angular.

[osdiab]

What's mostly resulted in Javascript land is people using opinionated (and often severely constrained) boilerplate generators like create-react-app, with opinionated linters like Prettier (alongside transpiling Javascript from other languages like TypeScript), that force a coding still despite the myriad ways to achieve things - I've actually found that to mitigate a lot of these issues well, but it can't deal with the boatload of "bad" advice online to wade through.

[Fellshard]

Even with opinionated generators, what happens when you pull in a library that comes from a very functional mindset, a second that treats JS like Smalltalk, and a third that was thrown together by a novice and has become the de facto standard for its purpose?

The issue doesn't just lie within the baseline of the code you write, but in how many disjoint dialects that code must interact with and partially conform or contort to in order to engage with.

[DeathArrow]

If you have a word to say and if you have to use a framework, take a look at Vue. It's not opinionated, it doesn't get in the way, it doesn't come with the kitchen sink.