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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Dunno. But i think JS has actively harmed software development in the past 10 years. It's a bad language, designed and patched hastily that does not work well with humans nor machines. It took 10 years to allow having some form of synchronicity with promises, and that's just disguised callback hell. Callback depth is an inherent human limitation, because our working memory is very limited , so I consider JS a language that s unfit for humans and unfit for big projects.

Silicon valley adopted JS probably because of ease of access to cheap developers. Pity there is not a serious competitor from another Valley because i think they could beat them with superior performance in just about anything.

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I think the problem is that javascript has stopped being one language of many and has become the language.

There are hundreds of thousands of developers now who only know javascript. They have no perception of the parts of javascript that are badly designed because they don't know any other language. They think that computers taking 500ms to render a webpage is just how slow computers are because that's how it is with javascript. They think desktop applications that use 400MB of memory on startup are normal.

People no longer weigh up the pros and cons of javascript and decide it is the best option for a certain project. Javascript is all they know, and it shapes their entire view of programming.

Oh, come on. JavaScript doesn’t mean pages take 500ms to load. On my Node.js-powered server [1], pages take a handful of ms, and they only take that long because I’m doing a lot of sophisticated content management.

JavaScript has got some rough spots, but it’s a fine language these days, with a nice multi paradigm support.

[1] jamesshore.com or letscodejavascript.com — they both run on the same servers.

I'm pretty sure they're talking about client side JS bundles, not a NodeJS server that renders HTML.

Heh, good point. It’s still a silly language-wars comment, but it makes more sense.

The kinds of devs who don’t regularly learn new languages are generally the ones you don’t want to hire.

Learning new languages is a different thing than crunching into the next JavaScript fud.

The great thing about learning more languages is that you tend to gain new skills to take back to your old projects. This is especially true for languages meaningfully different than those you know.

The same can be true of frameworks, databases and other tools.

I can stand yet another javascript critic(just boring nonsense) but, “cheap developers” ?! that’s unfair to the many brilliant people out there, people that build new stuff and create value making the best with what they have and mastering the art without being chic. And Callback hell it’s just an old argument that’s been solved many times even before promises

OP didn't say all JS developers are cheap. They just said there's plenty cheap JS devs around, since everybody and their dog these days are doing frontend dev. Some, like you say, are brilliant.

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