[theptip]

I take your point, but I think you could fairly say that JS has been going through growing pains since its inception 25 years ago. It's always been a fast-moving, inconsistently-implemented language. (E.g. Netscape / Mozilla vs. IE support for browser features).

Maybe things are going to calm down a bit? I could believe it. But I just don't see the churn stopping. The browser-as-OS is going to keep getting new features, which JS must bind to. And some users are going to use old browsers that don't support them. So the runtime is inexorably fragmented, vs. say a server-side environment where you mostly write code for a well-known runtime that you get to define.

And what about when everybody starts using wasm to compile other languages into JS? Another explosion of tooling and changes to how we do web development is just round the corner.

Regardless of whether we're coming to the end of it, I think it's more specific than just "growing pains" though - it's not just that we're fixing issues, it's that we're repeatedly throwing away old tools in favor of smaller, more-focused new tools, that then in turn grow in scope over time.

I'm not even mad at all this; I think it's a fundamental part of how software languages and communities make progress; there's no real path for a language/tool/framework to get _smaller_, so they either increase in scope or stay the same, with the latter being quite rare, and both options giving a path for some other thing to supersede them.

I just think it's most pronounced in the JS ecosystem, and find it amusing that we've come full circle on so many of these points, again - although I believe with genuine improvements on the previous iterations. (So more like a spiral; the same location in some dimensions, but with a higher elevation.)

[phist_mcgee]

>when everybody starts using wasm

I would say this is a far off possibility. The need to write WASM code rarely surfaces for the average SPA, and really seems like its more applicable to games or sites with heavy processing needs.

For better or worse, it's going to be JS/TS for a long while yet.

[theptip]

Perhaps I used the wrong phrase with “just around the corner”. My prediction would be that we’ll see major SPAs in wasm in ~3-5 yrs.

This is not imminent from a developer’s perspective, but I think it is close on the “language evolution” timescale. As in, soon enough that I’m not sure we will have a long period where JS stabilizes before wasm revolutionizes it again.

Not a high-confidence prediction either way though.

[exdsq]

I avoided this fact for years, running from JS/TS for “better languages”. After a stint with Haskell I’ve decided the grass isn’t that much greener so just accepting that JS is what it is - one of the worlds most popular languages which can run in most places and therefore worth learning.

[JoelMcCracken]

I'm curious, what turned you away from Haskell?