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Comment by morganherlocker | Hacker News Reader

This reads a bit like early internet critics complaining about how there are too many voices online. "Why isn't the Times enough for everyone? Why do these bloggers need to be telling everyone what they think? Some of them don't even check their facts!"

> It is Torvald’s “Release early and often” without the community smashing the ego of anyone publishing sub-par code.

The relative lack of Torvalds-esque public shaming is exactly what I love about the Javascript community. There is an acknowledgment that we can all do things our own way, and that it's OK. We don't need a dictator shouting down people "doing it wrong".

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And it's such a different set of goals. You're unlikely to break something fundamental with Javascript, which is fantastic. It's a safer thing to play with than a kernel. Put sub-par code in the Linux kernel, and your computer doesn't boot. Mess up your JS and your webpage renders off-center. The severity of failure is so different that it'd be silly to get bent out of shape over it.

Of course, you can do insane things in JS, but that's part of the fun. Even at its worst, it'll crash a program or browser tab that can just be reloaded. Annoying and inconvenient, but the computer's still chugging and no harm's done.

The worst case is not an off-center web page, the worst case is exposing user information or making your backend attackable in other ways. Just because you use JavaScript and it runs on a client machine far away you are not magically protected from screwing up.

Sure. Yes, security is hard. You got me there. Javascript does not decrease your attack surface, and is not, in fact, magic.

That's not a free-pass negation of my point that crashing a browser tab is substantially less severe than a kernel panic, and thus likewise greater engineering due diligence is needed for its code. There's nothing magical about it.

There's a freedom I had when I didn't know what I was doing to never know I was "doing it wrong". Reading Reddit, Hacker News, and various forums over the course of my career have definitely put me in the upper echelons of expertise (and my clients have certainly appreciated that). At the same time, there's a creativity that comes from "I'm going to solve this in the only way I can think to" that people often loose sight of as they gain expertise. When you know it's the road less-traveled, you're less likely to walk it yourself, even if there are some great solutions down there that nobody else can see because they're blinded by groupthink.

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