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Comment by shmel | Hacker News Reader

Why do you compare it to Rust though? JS is as old as Java, however its ecosystem seems to be much less mature (at least from outside). I haven't touched Java for 15 years, but I am fairly confident that people still use Apache Ant as build system. Every time I try to peak into JS world, it appears similar to tiktok trends in terms of how quickly people move from one thing to another.

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It's even worse from the inside. The last 2 companies I have worked at have had significant amounts of JS code (even the majority of code) and it's inevitably became unmaintainable mess through a combination of lack of solid frameworks to instill structure and trying to apply it outside of its domain of the browser.

The last 3-5 years have convinced me that JS isn't appropriate outside of a browser almost ever. I am sure if you think hard enough you can think of cases where it's superior to some other lang but in general it's a very poor choice for almost anything that isn't DOM manipulation.

Worst was definitely attempting to diagnose an off-heap memory leak due to C extensions. Naturally the JS folk gave up and dumped the problem on my lap so I proceeded to do my usual "C guy" stuff and was amazed at just how bad stuff like node-gyp and friends are and just how fragile everything is. I found the leak and patched it and all was "ok" again but just peeking inside those layers makes you deeply uncomfortable with the runtime in production.

The rest of the problems can probably be attributed to lower quality developers but point remains. Things like lack of structure leading to insane architectures, pushing for microservices without understanding the tradeoffs because they didn't want to work on "legacy" JS code that was built with last years hipster tech rather than this years, etc. These problems are endemic to to culture and ecosystem which IMO are inseparable from a language/tool in practice despite what we want to believe in theory.

I don't refuse to work with JS but I definitely make my concerns abundantly clear and I generally don't hold back with "I told you so" when it inevitably bites people in the ass.

> I am fairly confident that people still use Apache Ant as build system

As in: there are still (older) projects around that haven't (yet) migrated away from Ant? Sure.

As in: Ant is still the go-to build system or at least still commonly used? No, not at all. When I create a new Java project in IntelliJ for example, I can choose between Maven and Gradle as the build system. Ant isn't even offered as an option.

JS is as old as java, but they're both talking about the build process of JS.

in the beginning, JS wasn't really transcoded/compiled. The first time i personally found out about that was sometime after 2010 with coffeescript, not sure if there were preceeding examples.

and your claim that people move around is really false. React has been the defacto standard for a pretty long time at this point.

yes, other UI libraries/frameworks exist, but reacts marketshare has been extremely dominant since it displaced jquery/ember etc

I don't think anyone really has strong opinions about JS on the frontend. It seems relatively fit for purpose there.

Most contention I have seen is around attempting to apply it outside the browser. That path only seems to lead to misery.

But js backend has been even more stable with express being the defacto standard since the beginning...

Express isn't a framework though, maybe a "micro-framework". The nearest competitor to real frameworks like ASP.NET or Spring is Nest.js and it's definitely not got the same longevity as those stalwarts.

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