> Or if it just exists because JavaScript developers don’t want to learn something new.
It's probably a big reason. But if you think about it from the other angle... you don't want to learn Javascript, which would be new to you :-)
It's probably a big reason. But if you think about it from the other angle... you don't want to learn Javascript, which would be new to you :-)
I’m okay writing JavaScript as long as I don’t have to spend all day every day writing it.
I was primarily a PHP backend dev for 15 years who only used jQuery to toggle classes on click actions, but decided to try something new and switched to Node in 2015.
Node + ECMAScript 2015 just BLEW my mind and was so fun, that not only am I now primarily a Node dev, but I've excelled extensively in the frontend.
I've never enjoyed building websites or web apps as much as I have in the last 5 years.
I have began utilizing Node + React for frontend use cases but find that my build pipelines become incredibly cluttered and esoteric rather quickly.
Am going to explore wasm solutions, thanks :)
Would you mind providing some more details here? After Python packaging drove me batty for the last time, I wouldn't have described the switch to JS/CS/TS as "struggling"?
With respect to "build pipelines", you don't have to use grunt, gulp, etc. It's totally fine to have regular bash commands in npm scripts.
I love using it as a "one-off" scripting language which usually involves interaction with some sort of an existing codebase.
I'm also fairly confident in doing any sort of backend-centric work, in which existing components most likely exist as well (or at the very least something POC-esque to iterate on or scaffold from).
With that said I believe most of these difficulties stem from most of my experience being backend-centric roles, so when it comes time to implement a frontend from scratch, I become unsure of where to start. The sheer amount of technologies available and vast amount of flexibility is also very intimidating.
However I've been slowly but surely immersing myself in the stack(s), and have found that much like my experience with CSS the best way to learn is to simply do it-- making mistakes and learning from them in my exploratory learning.
I do appreciate what you said about build pipelines and feel much better about my current projects :-)
quick edit: I think my lack of experience in functional programming is another factor here, however Typescript's object orientated style is very attractive.
It solves the problem of how to run your non-web based code in a browser, but until it can interoperate with the DOM, JS will continue to be mandatory.
For example, see the wasm-bindgen and the generated web-APIs in web-sys: https://docs.rs/web-sys/0.3.49/web_sys/
A nice framework that takes advantage of this is yew: https://yew.rs/docs/en/
JavaScript consistently ranks as one of the most loved languages in Stack Overflow surveys...
I find plenty of counter-examples of this point on HN too - engineers who have worked across many different stacks and rank JS/TS as one of the best dev experiences they've had (there is one such comment in this comment tree)
Anecdotally, I feel as if pre-ES6 a lot of the complaints you read online were from users of the language. Nowadays, it's as if most of the complaints are from people who don't use it.
I think there is something to be said about refusing to learn anything but JS, as knowing different languages can be a boon for an engineer, but I believe it's an excellent tool to have in one's belt nowadays.
JS has warts, undoubtedly so. But I try to approach it like I would Clojure and it makes the experience much better for me. I think JS has the bones of a Lisp if you're willing to look for them. Sure it doesn't have macros or decent conditional expressions or immutability but using something like Ramda gets you some of the way there. And there are proposals for pattern matching and immutable data structures though they are fairly far off.
I think JS is at its worst when people try to code it as poor version of Java or C#. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Typescript for this reason. Some aspects of its type system are great like being able to make a union out of anything, I wish OCaml had that. But I think denying Javascript's inherent dynamic nature is a mistake.
Overall I've learned to ignore its worst parts and just focus on what made it good from the start, being a weird cousin of Scheme that runs in the browser.