Javascript was the first modern high level programming language available to the masses, and easily the simplest to use and deploy. It allowed millions of peopl

Javascript was the first modern high level programming language available to the masses, and easily the simplest to use and deploy. It allowed millions of people a degree of creative freedom only available in universities, and it's the reason the web is more than simply a collection of research papers. I know a good portion of HN wishes it were otherwise, because the endless (and at times deranged) antipathy towards javascript is so constant here there is an entire rule in the guidelines telling people to not just go on a full tilt rant about its very existence when a site requires it. But for everyone else (especially those of us for whom javascript was a gateway drug) it was obviously not a mistake. The mistake was all of the extra complexity and nonsense that came about when SV realized the web was Serious Business. Having to compile it from a "strict superset" language because Serious Business means strict types and tests, tests tests. Taking it out of the browser, aligning the entire ecoysystem to a single, fragile, badly designed point of failure. Let's abandon the entire field of application programming and just ship an entire Chromium instance and a webapp for everything. What happened to all of my RAM? Who cares, everything is free now, numbers are a lie. I mean the entire point of frontend frameworks was supposed to be that it would simply be faster to transport JSON diffs rather than entire html pages, and do the rendering in the browser. But of course any such efficiencies wound up being eaten by increasingly bloated and inefficient code. And now people are discovering backend rendering and "vanilla" JS like Howard Carter discovering the tomb of King Tut. Javascript the language, even Javascript the idea (being able to write and run code on the web) is at worst neutral, and arguably a good idea. At least from the point of view of the old hacker ethos where the point is to liberate the masses from the gatekeepers of intellect and information is as many ways as possible. But as with everything else turning to shit in our world, blame capitalism for taking something with the potential for good, and utterly ruining it.