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Comment by martpie | Hacker News Reader

Rambling, rambling, rambling. There are so many wrong things in this post that I don't know where to start, from the design controversy to packages syntax without talking about the package manager. But other comments will debunk them better than me.

That said, a lot of people say JavaScript is bad. And yet this language is one of the most popular one in the world.

And people never ask themselves: "oh, maybe there is something I did not understand about the language/ecosystem".

> "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Peace.

ps: also, it's not the tools that matter, but what you build.

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I see that as literally the main point that the author sets out to argue: popularity does not equal quality.

I don't think it's a very controversial idea that JS is popular due to its monopoly status rather than its qualities (whatever we argue them to be).

I find it hard to imagine that JS would have ever been very popular on the backend or on smartphones if it wasn't for the monopoly of the frontend. The fact is, today you can cover many bases with this one language. This is great for businesses where the primary concern is how quickly you can get a new person to sit in someone's seat, so this opens up a lot of jobs. A lot of jobs means a lot of incentive to learn the language, closing the loop.

In short, for many actors on the market, there are many reasons to use JS without having to like JS, or even care about its qualities as a language.

I'm not sure why it's hard to swallow that JS (the cultural phenomenon) has qualities that aren't inherited from JS (the artifact).

I personally hate when developers make fisher price websites with javascript for GUI, when all or almost all of it can be replaced with HTML and some CSS. You know, things my browser can execute with highly optimised machine code.

>things my browser can execute with highly optimized machine code

...this includes JS - every browser includes an engine that does exactly this, in fact.

It’s this lack of understanding of how the language and browsers function that makes these tired arguments particularly infuriating.

My browser contains an engine that transpiles and optimises arbitrary javascript to run faster than native APIs?

>faster than native apis

Of course not. Neither said by me, or your post I quoted. HTML and CSS aren’t any more “native apis” then the JS implementation of the w3c spec anyway either.

> That said, a lot of people say JavaScript is bad. And yet this language is one of the most popular one in the world.

The post is about the fact that just because something is popular, it doesn't necessarily mean it's good. The fact that JavaScript is popular cannot be used as proof that it's a good technology. It had a monopoly of the browser market for decades. If Netscape put COBOL there, everyone would be programming in COBOL today.

I do not believe that popularity equals quality.

https://betterexplained.com/articles/logical-fallacy-popular...

Some people never ask themselves "have I actually read what I am criticising?".

Your account is only one hour old, so some advice: learn to accept criticism if you’re going to submit your own blog posts to HN.

His reply is fair however, criticism relies on someone evaluating one's arguments rather than blurbing out a stock reply. There was no engagement there within those critical comments.

In my opinion, it is a pretty lazy criticism if one could call it that. It implies that popularity necessarily implies quality. This is most definitely not the case.

"Rambling, rambling, rambling" part is especially unnecessary. How about quoting parts from the article instead and let us know what you think is wrong? As it is, I cannot imagine what I would reply to this "criticism", besides the fact that it incorrectly implies that popularity necessarily means quality.

Some authors never ask themselves, “Have I actually read what I wrote?”

Your post was rambling, in the sense that you make an assertion but then you complain about things not that related to your assertion. You never even define what you mean by bad. Then you use these reasons as justifications for why it’s “bad”:

A) Left pad exists. Basically, people in JS use packages instead of writing simple things themselves

B) A weird design decision with Axios, a third party library

C) A bug in Axios has been left open for a while

D) The built in map function is weird

E) Babel / Webpack get more money than OpenSSL

Only D is actually about the language itself, and E sort of is in a tertiary way but you never actually explain in any depth what your issue with Babel and Webpack getting funding is or what it means about JavaScript.

> it's not the tools that matter, but what you build. Given this logic we all should be writing in Algol.

my point is complaining about JS does not prevent people to build amazing things with it. When products are great, you do not care about the underlying technologies.

What makes you think so? Product may be great in it's main objective but slow as compared to what could have been, ineffective in spending computing resources, unable to scale as much as it otherwise could, insecurely handling data, etc.

Actually, after years of Django, this is such a pain for me to create a SPA with the same level of quality, that I'm considering stopping web development to learn ML.

So, maybe it does not prevent SOME people, but it's about to prevent me.

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