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Comment by increment_i | Hacker News Reader

Whenever these kinds of JS commentaries pop up on HN nowadays, I notice two distinct camps of commenters emerge: Those who are obviously steeped in the JS scene and are delighted to argue the finer, more sophisticated points of it, and those who take their best look, step back, and criticize this convoluted house of cards - and of course proceed to be downvoted into the Stone Age as the latest casualty of HN censorship.

My only observation of note I guess is the sheer marvel that all of this is nearly entirely supported by the Open Source community, and the amount of engineering effort being poured into the JS ecosystem at this point in time is nothing short of astounding. I can't wait to see where it goes in the next few years.

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> and of course proceed to be downvoted into the Stone Age as the latest casualty of HN censorship

That's not true. If anything, more people here support the house of cards view.

It's a common cognitive bias on HN to see the community as lined up against one. Of course the opposite side imagines the same thing. L'enfer c'est les autres.

We had a discussion about this in my last team. It really comes down to the JS community being divided in 2.

You have the first group, of which most of us were part of at least at some point: developing in our language of choice and being "forced" to use JavaScript for some frontend stuff, in the same way we kind of have to use SQL in some form when hitting a database.

That group generally wants to touch JS has little as possible then forget about it. Ideally making it as close to their language of choice as possible (similar to ORMs for database).

Then there's the other side, people who are running away with it and pushing it as far as possible. That also comes with some problems (JS fatigue, millions of frameworks, etc).

But generally, most comments will fall in one of the 2 categories.

> That group generally wants to touch JS has little as possible then forget about it.

WebAssembly will be the thing which grants that wish. Once there's a compiler for your language of choice that can compile to WebAssembly the need to use JavaScript will be kept to a minimum.

Bingo. And that, IMO, will be it. The problem right now is that people have no choice. They can use compiled to JavaScript languages, but they're ALL leaky abstractions.

Once people can use the tool they want instead of the tool they have to use, things will be a lot better.

One thing about WebAssembly (and compile to JS languages have had that issue for a long time, and still do to some extent) is the tooling. If the debugger doesn't properly handle breakpoints in the original source (for real. Not the garbage that is sourcemaps that can't even properly map variable names), and if people developing in WebAssembly languages still have to think javascript, then it won't be much better.

Y but you will have to support JS for 10+ years regardless

Maybe not. There's a WebAssembly polyfill for browsers which don't yet (or never will) support WebAssembly: https://github.com/WebAssembly/polyfill-prototype-1

And the load times are still good: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#can...

> criticize this convoluted house of cards - and of course proceed to be downvoted into the Stone Age as the latest casualty of HN censorship.

Pretty much all of the top comments are criticisms like you have outlined. They almost always are, too - they might get downvoted, but they get upvoted a lot more.

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