Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

As a JavaScript developer none of this matters to me. Here is the reality I see:

JavaScript skills are in demand almost everywhere even if it is not the primary language or skill of a given job. Almost nobody receives any kind of formal education or training in how to write in JavaScript. If you work for a web based company you WILL at some point be tasked to write in JavaScript.

When developers, who have never touched JavaScript before, are tasked to write JavaScript one of a couple things happen. First, they will attempt to write Java (C# or whatever) in this language because the syntax roughly looks the same. Secondly, they will grab the easiest framework they can find and hope to fill in the blanks.

Essentially, at the end of the day, almost nobody knows what they are doing. In this line of work most people are utterly afraid to write code. We would be in much better shape if our biggest problems were developers or students cheating.

Some food for though: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66hpqs/less_th...

What??

This seems like a road that only leads to technical debt brought on by people who, as you say, know nothing about the code they're working on. Why would you feel that's acceptable to a company?

Fortunately software development (often) has little direct impact on matters of life or death, but can you imagine an architect or construction worker who successfully cheated their way through school being brought on and having zero idea of how to weld, or how to predict the weak points in a structure?

Also, I'd argue that using frameworks is different than 'not writing code,' though I do agree that the JS community has become framework-obsessed...

> This seems like a road that only leads to technical debt brought on by people who

This technology is littered by technical debt by people doing everything they can to cheat. We are already there. That line in the sand was crossed years ago.

> Essentially, at the end of the day, almost nobody knows what they are doing. In this line of work most people are utterly afraid to write code. We would be in much better shape if our biggest problems were developers or students cheating.

It's really the terrifying thing. What's more terrifying is somebody that thinks they do know what they are doing. Once in a great while they will be right, but far more often they are wrong, disastrously wrong.

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