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Comment by hipsters_unite | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is this whole article a description of a full-stack web developer rather than a JS engineer?

Everyone wants a full stack dev these days… how many are there really?

I think it's a great thing to aspire to (I certainly do), but yeah, don't think you could claim to be there until you'd put in some serious years, there's just too much to know, too many languages with too many weird edge quirks.

I'm one, but I've had 26 years of experience in programming and software development to learn the stacks. At the company I work for arguably 4 of the 8 developers are full stack developers, so we can't be that rare.

One thing that I'm not seeing here is the long view. Sure, learn JavaScript, but recognize that due to its sub-standard nature it will be a transitional technology until a better run-time for web apps than web browsers comes along. JavaScript's popularity now is akin to the massive success of Visual Basic were a large number of adequately skilled programmers could crank out the needed business applications. JavasScript allows for much the same, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not something that will last into the future. So instead of learning JavaScript, learn how to program, how to develop software, and how to keep your fire alive so you want to learn the new stuff that will eventually replace what you're using now.

I sure as heck don't want to go back to Visual Basic, and I look forward to the day we don't have the HTML/CSS/JavaScript morass to build our software on.

In all fairness though, it's very easy to bash JS, but the anonymous functions etc., that are really core to the language are pretty powerful. I used to hate it a lot more than I do now, but one day I realized that apart from its more patchy areas (no strftime, what?), it actually covers off a lot of coding styles and patterns you need in order to get stuff done.

Functions being first class citizens are all JavaScript really has going for it (that and a captive audience), and any new web oriented language could incorporate that as well as improvements over JavaScript's awful everything else.

Not that JavaScript isn't useful - it is, and it does allow you to get things done. But imagine the uncountable number of man years that have been wasted coping with JavaScript when it's clearly obvious that something better would have made our jobs a lot easier.

Yeah true, I think you've hit the nail on the head - much as I sometimes wish something like Python were the standard instead, the lambda functions are fiddly (even if the list comprehensions are great).

JavaScript has been around long enough to arguably be called a mature language. It doesn't really need to be "better" (any more than any other language). It's the environment that's crappy - the Browser. But those aren't going anywhere. You're going to be waiting a long time before something supplants it.

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