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> Also, the barrier is low, and therefore we have a lot of complex websites built by novices, running in development mode in the actual production. I'm not a h

> Also, the barrier is low, and therefore we have a lot of complex websites built by novices, running in development mode in the actual production. I'm not a huge fan of the "Javascript programmers are novices" myth. It's quite damaging. Javascript is a kitchen-sink language these days in the ES6+ world. You've got the functional programming features... monads, functors, applicative and even immutable data structures are just a library. You have classes, interfaces, protocols and of course event-driven programming, prototypes, etc, etc, etc. It's not a small spec these days. The point is that there are smart people who use the language to great effect. Enough with the "unwashed masses," story please. Personally I'll take an ML or Lisp based language anyway... but thankfully I can have my cake and eat it too by compiling to Javascript.

LeoNatan25 10y ago
Nothing here disproves the claim you try to disprove. "There are smart people" - that's a given, but how does that disprove that the barrier is low, and the vast majority of less-to-none experienced developers choose JS these days?
- agentultra 10y ago
  I was tackling the blanket assertion that Javascript developers are novice programmers. It's understood that there are programmers of all skill levels who use Javascript. However statements like the aforementioned are dangerous when people just assume it must be true. There are novice programmers and many of them choose Javascript is more accurate. The aforementioned assertion is used as a pejorative by programmers from other languages who think, perhaps rightfully so, that Javascript is inferior to their language of choice. That doesn't make Javascript programmers as a whole inferior despite what such a blanket statement implies.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    I think in general since the number of programmers grows, the majority must be novices, and the language growing most rapidly has relatively the largest amount of novices. I know it sounds like snobistry and not a statistical blanket statement, though.
  - LeoNatan25 10y ago
    "There are novice programmers and many of them choose Javascript is more accurate." - this is how I read the GP's comment.
bloomca 10y ago
My first "serious" programming language was JavaScript, and I didn't know a lot of basic stuff for a long time – because it is considered normal in JS community! Nowadays we have node.js, so you have to know at least a bit about your terminal, how to run server, kill processes and other everyday stuff, but back in the days it was unnecessary. And this is not a single story; I've also interviewed some people and for some reason my experience is that JS has very low entry barrier. Yes, with tail recursion we'll have almost full FP (only pattern matching is missing), but it doesn't mean that every novice will go and study them right after landing – in fact, the opposite, because there are much more tutorials about OOP JS.

LeoNatan25 10y ago

Nothing here disproves the claim you try to disprove. "There are smart people" - that's a given, but how does that disprove that the barrier is low, and the vast majority of less-to-none experienced developers choose JS these days?

agentultra 10y ago
I was tackling the blanket assertion that Javascript developers are novice programmers. It's understood that there are programmers of all skill levels who use Javascript. However statements like the aforementioned are dangerous when people just assume it must be true. There are novice programmers and many of them choose Javascript is more accurate. The aforementioned assertion is used as a pejorative by programmers from other languages who think, perhaps rightfully so, that Javascript is inferior to their language of choice. That doesn't make Javascript programmers as a whole inferior despite what such a blanket statement implies.
- fsloth 10y ago
  I think in general since the number of programmers grows, the majority must be novices, and the language growing most rapidly has relatively the largest amount of novices. I know it sounds like snobistry and not a statistical blanket statement, though.
- LeoNatan25 10y ago
  "There are novice programmers and many of them choose Javascript is more accurate." - this is how I read the GP's comment.

bloomca 10y ago

My first "serious" programming language was JavaScript, and I didn't know a lot of basic stuff for a long time – because it is considered normal in JS community! Nowadays we have node.js, so you have to know at least a bit about your terminal, how to run server, kill processes and other everyday stuff, but back in the days it was unnecessary. And this is not a single story; I've also interviewed some people and for some reason my experience is that JS has very low entry barrier. Yes, with tail recursion we'll have almost full FP (only pattern matching is missing), but it doesn't mean that every novice will go and study them right after landing – in fact, the opposite, because there are much more tutorials about OOP JS.