[holoduke]

It's funny that there is such a pro and anti js movement in the hardcore professional programming world. I know it's a bit off topic. But in every js topic here at hackernews you can feel this tension. I have never seen this before. And this place is visited by the best programmers out there . Very interesting

[jacobr1]

Here is my theory: it is a limitation of the medium of the web. In other software fields, one can use the tooling they like. But with the browser, JS is a must (nascent webasm may change that though). The Go people don't really fight the Rust folks, they just go off to their own camps, occasionally comparing and contrasting. But in the web/js world, everyone is forced to commingled, and so preferences collide.

[Spivak]

It's a combination of popularity, forced usage, organic growth, and maturity.

If every single developer ever had to write Java we would see the same complaints.

* A ridiculous amount of dependencies and tooling.

* As many competing ways to architect programs as there are Java developers.

* Lots of warts and quirks due to design missteps in hindsight. Ignored by the people who love it but grating to the people who don't.

* As many "the good parts" as there are Java developers.

* Everyone complaining about Spring like they do React.

For most languages if you don't like it you don't use it. But with JS (just like Java in the 90's and 00's) even if you don't vibe with JS it's completely unavoidable.

[52-6F-62]

I don't like a lot of the vitriol, but I do find reading those threads interesting and sometimes really enlightening. Sometimes I disagree, sometimes I agree, sometimes I learn, other times it's just bickering but just the same... it's strange, but interesting.

Pro JS (more TS) camp here.

[throwaway_pdp09]

There are 2 issues with JS. First is simply as a language. Some people hate it's weirdnesses, which I do understand, but the easy way is to deal with it is just be very explicit.

The more interesting one is JS as a web tool. The reason I'm so against it (and I am making a point and do not want to start an argument) is that it exposes a turing complete language directly to the web, said language having very substantial access to the browser, which stores and ultimately can expose an awful lot of personal information to the world. Where else do we allow this to happen?

JS per se isn't an issue, just the dangerously privileged position it's been given. Any other lang doing the same thing would be distrusted by me equally.

[Osiris]

Programming languages are just a means to an end. I've used various language over the years and what I remember is what I built, not whether the language had pattern matching or not.

I have fond memories of writing PHP because it helped build a site to share messages with my family before Facebook. I remember VB.net because I tried to write a game in college. I remember C# because I built a laptop battery meter that I still sell 10 years later. I remember learning JS with node.js because I wrote a log aggregator.

Let's stop focusing on the how we get there and celebrate what we build.

[yesenadam]

Aren't most popular languages like that? Pro-C, anti-C, pro-Lisp, anti-Lisp etc. Pro and anti Perl, Python, Haskell, Bash, Forth, C++, Go etc. Pro and anti OOP, pro and anti FP etc. There are the languages people argue over, and the languages nobody uses. (And a select group nobody uses but are still argued over - Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth, Prolog, APL etc)