Not to be a cynic, but I wonder how much of the motivation to create a competing runtime in recent months is in response to the eye gauging ( I know, I know. It’s all relative ) tens of millions in funding Deno just raised.

I don’t intend this as a knock on this project. Competition is good and, this space, unlike the rest of JavaScript, could do with more players. There are some promising numbers and claims here. I hope it works out.

I’m genuinely posing this intellectual question of financial incentive as an theory for JavaScript fatigue as a whole.

High profile threads on JavaScript fatigue trend on HackerNews multiple times a week. The wide range of theories about why web developers reinvent the wheel strangely leave out the financial incentives.

Everyone claims their framework is the fast, powerful, light, batteries included, modern, retro futuristic, extensible, opinionated, configurable, zero config, minimal (3kb, gzipped minified, of course ). The list goes on. A few days ago, I was chatting with someone how all these JavaScript libraries make these words have no meaning. To demonstrate, I screenshared a bunch of landing pages. At this point, I haven’t exhaustively, in one sitting, cross referenced these landing pages. 90% of the libraries shared the same layout. 3 columns / cards with one of those hyperbolic words.

Previously I thought it was pretentious and weird that Svelte marketed itself as “cybernetically enhanced web apps”. What does that even mean? Then again, none of the descriptor words like light, dynamic, and ergonomic mean much. At least Svelte was memorable.

Occasionally, one of these libraries would describe their interface as being ergonomically designed. As if other developers designed their interfaces to not be ergonomic. It’s like how we’d all like to think we’re nice, good, decent people. The majority of people would not do bad stuff if they perceived it as such.

I do think most JavaScript developers have good intentions. Then I’ve also seen DevRel / Evangelist types who shill their library, with disingenuous benchmarks, knowing full well there are better solutions, or that they can help make existing solutions better, to everyone’s benefit. The spoils include consulting, training, speaking fees, books, swag, collecting Patreon ( there are some controversial projects which come to mind ), resume building, GitHub activity social capital ( I’ve talked to some recruiters who were fixated on the idea that you publish code on GitHub, specifically Github, because to them, VCS=Git=GitHub, or it doesn’t exist )