| Mainstream went from C, to C++, to Java, to JavaScript. If you have written GUIs in C/Win, C++/Qt, Java/whatever, and JS/React (or Vue) you should have an idea of what went wrong. That's just GUIs. Bad code is always going to happen, when you make stuff will you regret some choices. That's a given. But at what cost you can refactor your way out depends a lot on the language you have used. Now there are languages that make it harder to create a mess that is hard to refactor yourself out of. They are languages to, you could say, optimize for refactoring by using strong typing. Rust, Haskell, Elm, OCaml/ReasonML/Rescript, Kotlin to some extend. But non of them are mainstream. The IDE assistance I got with refactoring C++/Qt in 2001 is still miles ahead with what I get with JS/React (or Vue) 2022. I recently did a Elm app on an automatically generated GraphQL API on a PG db with Hasura. I could auto generate typesafe bindings to the GraphQL schema in Elm. This was the first time I felt C++/Qt (or Ruby/Rails) kind of next-level powerful again. Type safety from db schema, through the API, to my frontend/UX code in strongly typed Elm. So I think it is improving, but not so much in mainstream languages. |