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Which is weird. I would have expected have the leftpad scandal that the community would have found a balance. To me, culture is a feature, and despite using JS

Which is weird. I would have expected have the leftpad scandal that the community would have found a balance. To me, culture is a feature, and despite using JS a lot since it has a monopoly on the browser, the community culture never clicked with me. I often feel like they are reinventing the wheel, not learning from other techs solving the same problems, under and over-engineering, regularly guilty of the XKCD 927 syndrom. Few projects taste integrated, working together, clean. The stacks looked like hacked together. Agreement on best practices and conventions are timidly showing up. It also seems popular tools are just starting to stabilize and the breaking modifications rhythm to slow down. At least more than anywhere else I worked. There is no way I can be objective saying this, but anyone with the same feeling?

_bxg1 7y ago
There are several explanations: 1) JavaScript is a first language for many, many new developers, especially the ones not coming from a formal computer science program. This is because it's multi-paradigm, extremely hireable, runs on everything, runs on the web specifically, and other reasons. If you're only going to learn one language, it's a very good and versatile choice. So its community has a lot of inexperienced members. 2) Because it's such a focal point of the industry, it gets a lot of attention from major players as well and has been evolving rapidly in terms of core features. These features usually get tested out first in the form of packages. 3) Being a dynamic language it's very easy to extend and hack. The prototype system even allows you to modify the behavior of its core primitives. 4) The more experienced devs who use it are often dissatisfied with the qualities of the base language, and so take advantage of its flexibility to try and extend it into what they think a good language is (see TypeScript, Ramda, RxJS, etc). The response to the leftpad scandal was for NPM to disallow packages being unpublished once they've been out for 72 hours, which really should've always been the case.

_bxg1 7y ago

There are several explanations: 1) JavaScript is a first language for many, many new developers, especially the ones not coming from a formal computer science program. This is because it's multi-paradigm, extremely hireable, runs on everything, runs on the web specifically, and other reasons. If you're only going to learn one language, it's a very good and versatile choice. So its community has a lot of inexperienced members. 2) Because it's such a focal point of the industry, it gets a lot of attention from major players as well and has been evolving rapidly in terms of core features. These features usually get tested out first in the form of packages. 3) Being a dynamic language it's very easy to extend and hack. The prototype system even allows you to modify the behavior of its core primitives. 4) The more experienced devs who use it are often dissatisfied with the qualities of the base language, and so take advantage of its flexibility to try and extend it into what they think a good language is (see TypeScript, Ramda, RxJS, etc). The response to the leftpad scandal was for NPM to disallow packages being unpublished once they've been out for 72 hours, which really should've always been the case.