We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford | Hacker News Reader

We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford

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8 pointsbapetel8 comments

I have a great deal of respect for Douglas Crockford but he's offering a complaint without a solution. By his own admission, it's too late for any new languages to seriously take hold.

This video was recorded before the rise of LLMs, making the specific language we use even less important. The reality is that the sunk costs of your existing codebase will almost always outweigh any advantage of trying a new language.

Is this a complaint or a confession?

Something of both, lol! It's definitely true that greenfield projects can and probably should at least look at other options. What I mean is that, for better or worse, after any significant code base gets established, changing the language it uses is akin to starting over. When you do, you're back at greenfield.

Many (most?) projects will never qualify for such a rewrite, so JS/TS it is. I'm a huge fan of both, so I'm ok with them being around for a while.

> The reality is that the sunk costs of your existing codebase will almost always outweigh any advantage of trying a new language.

Sunk costs are an irrelevancy, relative future costs are what matters. Transition costs, especially for a mature product, may sometimes be an issue, especially if for some reason you are blocked from doing an incremental change.

And obviously neither irrelevant sunk costs nor relevant transition costs apply to a greenfield project.

This is a very deep insight but it does rely on people knowing what the relative future costs are and this is a much harder problem than looking back and so the part of the equation with the most evidence behind it tends to be given the greater weight.

What was described is standard economic practice --- but people violate it all the time. They retain an emotional attachment to money that is long gone.

In any case, the future is a judgment but the past is history --- and throwing more money at it won't change it or bring it back.

That's more than a decade or two too late. JS will be here in some form or other ages from now.

Yep, it will still be there. Google wanted to replace JS with Dart but they could'nt because i think JS is right now somehow like the base of web.

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