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Comment by gagege | Hacker News Reader

I think he kind of had a good point. It would be nice to have a single set of tools that can always get the job done no matter what.

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Not long ago I had to write some JS (had to, not wanted to) to do something on a site, and got something working based on what I knew, only to be derided by a "real JS developer" that my code was "deprecated", "not following best practices", "not modern", etc.

He gave me his version which was around 10x more code and only worked in a subset of the latest browsers, while mine not only did but would probably work in everything since maybe IE5 or so...

Maybe that's considered a bug, but I don't want any of this trend-chasing. I write code to get things done. My users don't care, and they want to get things done too.

If his ES6 required 10x more code than your ES5, then he doesn't actually know ES6.

I think he probably doesn't know JavaScript at that point. I remember I got invited to an interview one time and they were impressed by my code for their coding assignment partially because it could print out in less than a page (no minification), and they referred to another applicant whose code had taken 6 pages. And I was just like - how could it take that much code?

Sounds like he wasn’t a very good JS dev...?

if someone ended up with 10X the code using 'modern' JS and it did not work cross-browser while yours worked cross-browser including IE6 and up, then I strongly suspect I would prefer yours.

yes that would be nice, but then lots of things that do not match reality would be nice.

The second step to making things better is to believe they can and should be improved.

The first step is knowing that the current state of things is deficient in some way.

I think the should be improved is implicit in the first step, does can be improved imply a suggestion - if not the third step is a suggestion, and it's that third step I'm always seeing problems in, not to mention the third step in a scenario of too much too learn runs into the XKCD standards problem https://xkcd.com/927/

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