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We have been able to largely get rid of COBOL. Why haven't we been able to do the same with Javascript? It's a very useful language given the amount of existing

We have been able to largely get rid of COBOL. Why haven't we been able to do the same with Javascript? It's a very useful language given the amount of existing code and support, but very few people I know actually like it. In the 90s, vendors seriously invested in major development suites (Visual Studio, Visual Age, C++ Builder, Delphi, Visual Basic) and improve languages (Java, C#, Pascal, Basic) for desktop environments. But the web development landscape is largely dominated by Javascript, which is actively hated, and Typescript, a better but far from great alternative, with everything else being a tiny percentage. What happened?

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
What happened is that contempt culture solidified as one language became the top language. What happened is contempt culture solidified as pro-native-users came together over their disdain for the web. The is a steady stream of js contempt on HN. I don't think it's representative of how actual devs think about JS. The contempt forever seems stuck at the shallowest stages, of assuming JSnis terrible & disparaging it out of hand, without making a single claim or contention. Building on the web is not difficult & gets your experience in front of users fast. We've made better and better tools, while exploring a huge variety of app development styles. I don't know what js did to so many of y'all. I've done web stuff across libcgi, perl, php, java, and yeah early js has some warts but it's like 98% the same as any other language would be (even if classes looked weird for the first decade). The npm package management ecosystem is vastly easier to use & understand than anything I'd seen before. It's unclear what about this language makes people so miserable, and it's not something I've seen in person in my professional career. But the contempt is on high display regularly in the comments.
- dleeftink 3y ago
  I think much contempt is actually directed at how JS features have not always had the same performance profile, support, or implementation across browsers. The language itself is fine, and incongruities have long been polyfilled. With Shared Array Buffers, Webworkers, WASM and WebGPU, offloading heavy computational work will only become easier.
- AlexAndScripts 3y ago
  npm is easy to use? In my experience npm and the ecosystem that surrounds it are the only package managers I have ever used that consistently don't work, and in terms of design/ease of use in the theoretical scenario of it working properly it's marginally better than pip and significantly worse than cargo and hex.
- namaria 3y ago
  I guess some people don't see the problem with an excess of accidental complexity when they get paid a lot of money to do simple things like building UIs in a very complicated way.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    It feels cheap to me to write off an ecosystem that did amazing things because sometimes the job might be simple. Its rooting around to try to be unhappy. And it's unclear that it really is a problem. An endpoint in node and a small react app can be be cobbled together in an hour. That same basis in skill scales up nicely. Is there really a complexity problem? It seems like a hand wavy excuse.
    - namaria 3y ago
      Yeah the hello world stories are always golden paths. People be making bloated, hard to reason about, hard to understand and debug software for some extra money and I'm digging to be unhappy? ok...
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Any popular language is going to seem like it sucks because everyone is going to have an opinion of it. Yes, even your favorite language that you think would be so much better on the web than JS. We're stuck with JS because it's easier to just improve it than swap out the entire ecosystem. Now it's quite good.
graemep 3y ago
Not a good analogy. 1. Cobol is still around and it is much older than JS 2. Cobol systems is not as entrenched client side JS. It is used on websites because it is what browsers support.
Alifatisk 3y ago
> We have been able to largely get rid of COBOL. My understanding is that Cobol is still largely relevant in the banking industry, it’s not mentioned that often. Someone could correct my if I’m wrong and has more insight.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

What happened is that contempt culture solidified as one language became the top language. What happened is contempt culture solidified as pro-native-users came together over their disdain for the web. The is a steady stream of js contempt on HN. I don't think it's representative of how actual devs think about JS. The contempt forever seems stuck at the shallowest stages, of assuming JSnis terrible & disparaging it out of hand, without making a single claim or contention. Building on the web is not difficult & gets your experience in front of users fast. We've made better and better tools, while exploring a huge variety of app development styles. I don't know what js did to so many of y'all. I've done web stuff across libcgi, perl, php, java, and yeah early js has some warts but it's like 98% the same as any other language would be (even if classes looked weird for the first decade). The npm package management ecosystem is vastly easier to use & understand than anything I'd seen before. It's unclear what about this language makes people so miserable, and it's not something I've seen in person in my professional career. But the contempt is on high display regularly in the comments.

dleeftink 3y ago
I think much contempt is actually directed at how JS features have not always had the same performance profile, support, or implementation across browsers. The language itself is fine, and incongruities have long been polyfilled. With Shared Array Buffers, Webworkers, WASM and WebGPU, offloading heavy computational work will only become easier.
AlexAndScripts 3y ago
npm is easy to use? In my experience npm and the ecosystem that surrounds it are the only package managers I have ever used that consistently don't work, and in terms of design/ease of use in the theoretical scenario of it working properly it's marginally better than pip and significantly worse than cargo and hex.
namaria 3y ago
I guess some people don't see the problem with an excess of accidental complexity when they get paid a lot of money to do simple things like building UIs in a very complicated way.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  It feels cheap to me to write off an ecosystem that did amazing things because sometimes the job might be simple. Its rooting around to try to be unhappy. And it's unclear that it really is a problem. An endpoint in node and a small react app can be be cobbled together in an hour. That same basis in skill scales up nicely. Is there really a complexity problem? It seems like a hand wavy excuse.
  - namaria 3y ago
    Yeah the hello world stories are always golden paths. People be making bloated, hard to reason about, hard to understand and debug software for some extra money and I'm digging to be unhappy? ok...

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Any popular language is going to seem like it sucks because everyone is going to have an opinion of it. Yes, even your favorite language that you think would be so much better on the web than JS. We're stuck with JS because it's easier to just improve it than swap out the entire ecosystem. Now it's quite good.

graemep 3y ago

Not a good analogy. 1. Cobol is still around and it is much older than JS 2. Cobol systems is not as entrenched client side JS. It is used on websites because it is what browsers support.

Alifatisk 3y ago

> We have been able to largely get rid of COBOL. My understanding is that Cobol is still largely relevant in the banking industry, it’s not mentioned that often. Someone could correct my if I’m wrong and has more insight.