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JS itself is perfectly fine and quite a nice language when you stick to all its modern idioms that you learned and use today. I think what rankles a lot of peo

JS itself is perfectly fine and quite a nice language when you stick to all its modern idioms that you learned and use today. I think what rankles a lot of people is going through the history of JS when it was terrible and confusing, then basically just jQuery, then the explosion and confusion of server side/node and drama with the company behind it, and finally confusion and drama with moving to modern ES modules. For the longest time doing the most simple thing in any programming language, putting code in a separate file and loading it to execute, was nearly impossible in JS and required learning and picking sides in an opinionated loader battle. It was confusing and pretty bad for newcomers. Nowadays all that drama is settled and the core of modern JS is quite nice. I like it more than python to be honest.

treis 3y ago
The problem with JS these days is not that what's there is bad. It's that there's not much there. Anything beyond the basics requires you to roll your own or go hunt for a library.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Very true, it's why I really like deno for server side since it's trying to plug that gap with a nice out of the box standard library. Client side it does feel like something like lodash is the new jQuery and just mandatory to use everywhere.
  - mst 3y ago
    And then of course you have to pick between lodash and ramda (I'd say "whichever your dependencies use" but every time I've tried to use that as a deciding factor the answer has turned out to be "both"). It's all a bit of a cambrian explosion but it at least means you run into "this awful API has been baked into core and now we're stuck with it" less often.
    - schemescape 3y ago
      Anecdote: when using Metalsmith and a sampling of plugins to build my fairly minimal static site, I ended up with 18 direct dependencies and 200 transitive dependencies, including 6 different file name matching libraries. I now prefer comprehensive standard libraries.
- jakelazaroff 3y ago
  As in, there's not much in the standard library? What other options are there beyond "roll your own" or "use a library"?
  - andirk 3y ago
    Don't use?
ElectricalUnion 3y ago
> and finally confusion and drama with moving to modern ES modules. (...) Nowadays all that drama is settled and the core of modern JS is quite nice. I like it more than python to be honest. Using a mixture of old, deprecated versions of Webpack, Angular, Babel, and Typescript, and a very big pile of code with plain bad (if not plain wrong) type annotations I wish that statement applied to me. Constantly attempting to keep all this nodejs stuff without vulnerabilities while migrating the least ammount of stuff at once is a daily challenge. And that comparison is pretty low bar, everything involving say pytorch is a flaming pile of bad waiting to explode.

treis 3y ago

The problem with JS these days is not that what's there is bad. It's that there's not much there. Anything beyond the basics requires you to roll your own or go hunt for a library.

qbasic_forever 3y ago
Very true, it's why I really like deno for server side since it's trying to plug that gap with a nice out of the box standard library. Client side it does feel like something like lodash is the new jQuery and just mandatory to use everywhere.
- mst 3y ago
  And then of course you have to pick between lodash and ramda (I'd say "whichever your dependencies use" but every time I've tried to use that as a deciding factor the answer has turned out to be "both"). It's all a bit of a cambrian explosion but it at least means you run into "this awful API has been baked into core and now we're stuck with it" less often.
  - schemescape 3y ago
    Anecdote: when using Metalsmith and a sampling of plugins to build my fairly minimal static site, I ended up with 18 direct dependencies and 200 transitive dependencies, including 6 different file name matching libraries. I now prefer comprehensive standard libraries.
jakelazaroff 3y ago
As in, there's not much in the standard library? What other options are there beyond "roll your own" or "use a library"?
- andirk 3y ago
  Don't use?

ElectricalUnion 3y ago

> and finally confusion and drama with moving to modern ES modules. (...) Nowadays all that drama is settled and the core of modern JS is quite nice. I like it more than python to be honest. Using a mixture of old, deprecated versions of Webpack, Angular, Babel, and Typescript, and a very big pile of code with plain bad (if not plain wrong) type annotations I wish that statement applied to me. Constantly attempting to keep all this nodejs stuff without vulnerabilities while migrating the least ammount of stuff at once is a daily challenge. And that comparison is pretty low bar, everything involving say pytorch is a flaming pile of bad waiting to explode.