[toomanybeersies]

I think you can absolutely be just as productive with JS, but it's also easy to be incredibly unproductive.

The problem I have with JS (both for server side and client side) is that there's usually several different packages/libraries/frameworks to achieve the same goal, and often one gets deprecated in favour of another, requiring constant updates and changes to the development and build environment. JS development is all about the flavour of the week. For example gulp/grunt/webpack, or NPM/bower/yarn. This is compounded by the lack of a standard library.

Every company has its own particular build system (and configuration of that system), libraries they use, style guide, and file/folder layout. It's also very easy to abuse scoping and class mutability, with only style guides and eslint to save you. It can be a lot of work keeping a larger and older project up to date.

[joelbluminator]

> The problem I have with JS (both for server side and client side) is that there's usually several different packages/libraries/frameworks to achieve the same goal, and often one gets deprecated in favour of another, requiring constant updates and changes to the development and build environment. JS development is all about the flavour of the week. For example gulp/grunt/webpack, or NPM/bower/yarn. This is compounded by the lack of a standard library

So which ecosystem is more productive then? What you just described is horrible for a company like Shopify; they aren't a 3 men team working in a garage. And even for a small team, why would you wanna chase a crazy ecosystem like that instead of focusing on your actual product?

[toomanybeersies]

I think that it can be a productive ecosystem if you have experienced technical leadership that's proactive in keeping things up to date. If you spend a bit of time every month or two keeping your dependencies up to date it's not too painless, but if you neglect it for years, then it's an absolute pain to update.

I've discovering this the hard way as I slowly upgrade our front end from AngularJS 1.4, no transpiler, gulp, and bower. Almost much nothing has been upgraded in 5 years, which is like 50 javascript years.

JS is not a great language to use if you're an independent beginner, you either have to follow a tutorial blindly to get a boilerplate setup and hope that in the 6 months since it was written nothing has changed in the libraries used and the tutorial is out of date, or you can spend hours learning how to structure a JS app.

I feel like I'm being harsh on JS. Ruby/Rails is an incredibly productive ecosystem for a beginner, but has the same problems with maintainability and upgrading if you neglect it too.

Any framework isn't productive when you're in greater technical debt than the Weimar Republic, and it's easy to write bad code in any language if you're lacking experience. Upgrading dependencies in any ecosystem is difficult if you don't touch your gemfile or package.json in half a decade. I've had the same problems upgrading our Rails app as our AngularJS app, I'm just much more qualified to handle them.

There were also no experienced Ruby/Rails or JS/AngularJS developers at my work until I joined (and there's still no experienced JS devs), and we've always been pushed to ship features, not improve performance or keep our dependencies up to date, so I've had limited opportunities to work on fixing technical debt. Not entirely sure why you'd create a product with two frameworks none of your employees have any experience in. On the plus side, with all this spare time I've had during lockdown, I've managed to make good headway in resolving a lot of that debt, beats spending my days watching Netflix or playing video games.