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>Hi, I am Darren, and I love JS - I will no longer be ashamed by it.

Don't make a programming language part of your identity. It's pathetic.

No one is "dunking on Javascript for the sake of dunking on Javascript." PHP, Go and other languages don't have these issues, or at best don't have them at the same frequency, nor are they as catastrophic when they occur.

No PHP dev ever woke up to discover the entire universe was broken because some rando who owned the function that left-aligned text in terminals deleted their repo in a fit of pique. Other languages vendor dependencies by default. Other developers use libraries which contain more than a single function so their dependency trees are shallower and less brittle. Other developers are less allergic to actually writing code than Javascript developers, so less of their application is offloaded to remote dependencies.

This isn't a JS issue, it's an ecosystem and culture issue. Back in the ancient days of JQuery modules, none of these problems existed. They're the result of Javascript being co-opted by SV and corporate interests. The necessary evils of piling on complexities in order to get the language to do things it wasn't meant to do, in contexts it wasn't meant to operate in, because money.

Hell, a lot of JS' problems stem from the fact that - alone among programming languages as far as i'm aware - JS development all but requires using another language entirely. No one writing Python actually uses a strictly typed "superset" of Python that compiles to Python, because they consider actually writing Python directly to be too dangerous. That would be ridiculous. Yet in JS, it's essentially mandatory.

Yeah, sorry but JS is kind of a comedy of errors right now, and it's never going to get better if people refuse to see its faults.



My dude, have you lived in the tech (or otaku) community for long?

Making a piece of tech (or any media) part of your identity is a tale as old as time, and arguably getting worse.

I mean, you’re right, it is pathetic, and we need to collectively grow up. But you might as well be saying “be a well adjusted person, eat well and exercise”. We are so insecure and needy that we ascribe our self worth to a tech fad or piece of media or media figure. But it’s the core problem we have in western society today: geek/otaku culture, with its highs and lows, has gone mainstream. We are so comfortable and abundant with basic resources that we are bored and unsatisfied with our status and function in society and desperate to fill that gap with something to geek out on.

We live in a world where Lennart Poeterring gets death threads over systemd, the Golang maintainers get threats over generics, TV show runners get death threats when they change a character’s story arc. And politically there’s lots of folks willing to eject democracy so their adopted club can rule for eternity. Is it all for the lulz?

Anyway I took this on a tangent but… really, “I can’t believe you use that programming language” has always been bad as far as I can remember (at least 35-40 years).


There's nothing wrong with making a language part of your identity but Darren is not even doing that, he simply said he loves JS.

I don't identify as a Python dev and I don't even work with Python much lately, I know package management isn't great and PyPI registry suffered malicious attacks recently, but I can still say I love Python, I started with it and the syntax is enjoyable.

But you are clearly making language hate part of your identity.

(BTW I'd actually thank JS for TS, if they added types natively they'd probably be limited like Python's and we'd be stuck with it, but they didn't so now we have a new language with a great type system that evolved beyond JS with variations that compile into WASM and such.)


Yeesh this really kicked off but thanks for the defence. For clarity I identify as a male programmer with Lego loving tendencies. JS is simply a tool I actually mostly enjoy using. I also use a lot of other languages, but really JS is one I'm always happy to come back to!


> No PHP dev ever woke up to discover the entire universe was broken because some rando who owned the function that left-aligned text in terminals deleted their repo in a fit of pique.

You act as if this is something that was forced upon you.

Giving some "rando" the power to "own" a function in your app is a power that you choose to give them. If you don't want that then don't do it.

Sentences like "Other languages vendor dependencies by default" are nonsense statements. Stop saying "language" when you mean "the kind of people I do/don't have a problem with".

> This isn't a JS issue, it's an ecosystem and culture issue.

Right, and when people tacitly insist otherwise—by being sloppy with their words and thoughts—then it makes it harder for people to recognize the problem, see what specifically needs to be fixed, and then proceed with the "okay, let's fix it now" part.




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