[papito]

In the early 2010s, the industry was dominated by mature and stable ecosystems, such as Python/Django and Rails. Then Node came about, and when it was still extremely immature, it got a ton of attention as an army of front-end devs started to flock to it. "We are backend engineers now too!".

Doesn't work that way. Node has been basically re-learning all the lessons learned a long time ago, and many lessons it didn't learn at all. The fact that the FAANG alumni then joined the orgy and reminded us that we are all lame because we really need to be doing distributed systems for everything (for the young ones - microservices), did not make things simpler.

Leave a JS project unattended for a few weeks and I go back to it with a sense of dread. What horrors await me?

In contrast, I dusted off an old Flask project from 8 years ago, upgraded the dependency manager, the major Python version, 2-3 hours and off I go.

[eternalban]

This was a relatively mild but necessary rant.

> re-learning all the lessons learned a long time ago

Because this is the same crew that sailed on the ship that sang the "over 30 is over the hills" song. In fact, wasn't our own /u/pg cheering this 'very wrong idea' of completely discounting experience on the side?

Surprise, surprise. Experience actually matters.

[hnbad]

But hiring college graduates is so much cheaper and they are so much easier to dazzle and don't have any outrageous demands like being able to spend time with their family. Why hire for quality when you can make it up with quantity?

[flohofwoe]

> by mature and stable ecosystems, such as Python...

Nothing I experienced in the JS ecosystem so far was as nearly as painful as the over a decade-long transition from python2 to python3, and now python3 has the same 'move fast and break things' mindset. It's kinda infuriating for use cases where python2 was more than good enough.

[norman784]

About python past mistakes and future breaking changes, I recommend you to check this talk[0] about the topic

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5Po77bfKI

[jen20]

Still to this day nothing is as painful as trying to get a pip package or ruby gem with a C dependency to build on hardware where a wheel or whatever the ruby equivalent is unlikely to exist.