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by austin-cheney
265 days ago
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> Most programmers don't understand the low level assembly or machine code. Most programmers that write JavaScript for a living don't really understand how to scale applications in JavaScript, which includes data structures in JavaScript. There is a very real dependence on layers of abstractions to enable features that can scale. They don't understand the primary API to the browser, the DOM, at all and many don't understand the Node API outside the browser. For an outside observer it really begs the Office Space question: What would you say you do here? Its weird trying to explain it to people completely outside software. For the rest of us in software we are so used to this we take the insanity for granted as an inescapable reality. Ironically, at least in the terms of your comment, is that when you confront JavaScript developers about this lack of fundamental knowledge comparisons to assembly frequently come up. As though writing JavaScript directly is somehow equivalent to writing machine code, but for many people in that line of work they are equivalent distant realities. The introduction of LLMs makes complete sense. When nobody knows how any of this code works then there isn't a harm to letting a machine write it for you, because there isn't a difference in the underlying awareness. |
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Although I'm sure you are correct, I would also want to mention that most programmers that write JavaScript for a living aren't working for Meta or Alphabet or other companies that need to scale to billions, or even millions, of users. Most people writing JavaScript code are, realistically, going to have fewer than ten thousand users for their apps. Either because those apps are for internal use at their company (such as my current project, where at most the app is going to be used by 200-250 people, so although I do understand data structures I'm allowing myself to do O(N^2) business logic if it simplifies the code, because at most I need to handle 5-6 requests per minute), or else because their apps are never going to take off and get the millions of hits that they're hoping for.
If you don't need to scale, optimizing for programmer convenience is actually a good bet early on, as it tends to reduce the number of bugs. Scaling can be done later. Now, I don't mean that you should never even consider scaling: design your architecture so that it doesn't completely prevent you from scaling later on, for example. But thinking about scale should be done second. Fix bugs first, scale once you know you need to. Because a lot of the time, You Ain't Gonna Need It.