Over the last few years, JavaScript has been ruined as a language for beginners, proponents of functional programming, and anyone who likes elegance. But as a

Over the last few years, JavaScript has been ruined as a language for beginners, proponents of functional programming, and anyone who likes elegance. But as a language for professionals who are willing to spend 40 hours a week on it and devote week after week to learning the internals of massive, rickety declarative APIs like Babel and Webpack, yes JavaScript has improved a lot for that audience. You have to be a dedicated professional though, ideally a former Rubyist. If you’re not, stay away. Learn Python. If you’re 20 and have learned just the basics of coding, but have not made any deep forays into software engineering, and can focus on a brand new codebase, and only support bleeding edge browsers, modern JavaScript is also ok too. Personally I think it’s the wrong direction. I went back to ES5 and am developing a non-insane toolset for that language.