The hate for JS frameworks is usually warranted, in this case I think nuance is missing. It's also not as black and white as people paint it to be, IMO.
But there is quite some projects where you don't even need that.
Learning HTML/CSS/JS is a good idea as ultimately any framework or serverside code will interact with some combination of the three. Having a strong grasp of how HTML/CSS/JS work is the perfect foundation for learning something that runs serverside. And you get there by building projects that predominantly lean on the three. Whether they are private or professional, who cares as long as they are cool and someone learns something from it?
For example angular hello worls is super duper simple. But then business apps become a giant pile of crap, the eprformance goes to shit and sometimes stuff that should work stops working. The issue is the magic, if use a sane library you can just run the code in debugger step by step and see what happens but with magic stuff you get a giant call stack with garbage that is impoosible to understand.
So when I can I rip out magic and replace it with function calls , getters and setters. Maybe is my bad luck that I always have to work on prtojects created by others and all the time this others did it wrong. Nobody can convince me that angularjs1 is a framework designed by competent people with experience in GUIs, maybe the newer version are better if those buys learned on the job what they should have known from the beginning.
I guess once you get into all the hooks and contexts and fancier stuff things might start to be a bit magical. But I like it a lot better than Angular, which I agree is very much overly magicked.
It's almost never warranted.
> In 2008 Crockford published a book announcing his discovery that Javascript, contrary to prevailing opinion, has good parts. He describes this as "heresy", and as "possibly the first important discovery of the 21st century", noting that it came as a "great surprise to the community of javascript developers, and to the world at large." He attributes the discovery to his having read the ECMAScript Standard, which he says "literally changed my life." He also notes that the specification document is of "extremely poor quality", "hard to read", "hard to understand", and says that the ECMA and the TC39 committee "should be deeply embarrassed".
I own that book and I still hate Javascript (it's not the fault of the book). Is there another language with such a book?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_crockford#Opinions_on_...
Perl maybe, if you end up having to re-read some.
There are many languages that I do not like, but I hate none, so I am curious for the reasons of that strong feeling?
The language is very permissive, making it not only easy to shoot yourself in the foot, but in the head as well. There is no easy way to say that your code is semantically correct because JS will allow it to digest anything. So, unless you do thorough review, bad code can easily get through.
Dependency hell if you're using NPM.
I'd be happy if the community was focusing on implementing some kind of default set of libraries, instead of adding syntactic sugar now and then on top of JS. I remember switching from Java to Kotlin, and the collection API was a real pleasure to work with. But in JS, everyone wants to use their set of libraries. Creating a starter project will get you hundreds of dependencies that you can never vet.
"The language is very permissive, making it not only easy to shoot yourself in the foot, but in the head as well. "
But I am actually not aware of much footguns of the language itself.
That is, if you stick with "the good parts" (even though I share not all the views from the book).
" Creating a starter project will get you hundreds of dependencies that you can never vet."
And it is possible to write clean vanilla js, or stick to limited frameworks. You have to maintain strict discipline though. And nowdays I would use typescript for a new project.
…and then I'll have no reason to dislike this language. Got it. Am I allowed to dislike the newish template literal syntax too?
But you said "hate" before, which is a bit stronger than not liking.
The only time I came close to hating a language, was when I was forced to overtake someones half assed php project.
And I still do not like the syntax and have never touched any php code ever since, but I still do not hate the language, or its designers or users. I just avoided it. But hate has the vibe of wanting to destroy something ..
And well, yes, a nice clean start of the web would not be such a bad thing - if there would be some language or plattform everyone can agree on. Which is likely not happen and will just recreate the mess we have already.
> hate has the vibe of wanting to destroy something
You may be right, and given half a chance…
The hate for large frameworks is warranted by their poor performance and bloat while struggling to achieve simple objectives in the most challenging ways.