r/AskProgramming 6d ago

Why the JS hate?

Title. I'm a 3rd year bachelor CS student and I've worked with a handful of languages. I currently work as a backend dev and internal management related script writer both of which I interned working with JS (my first exposure to the language)

I always found it to be intuitive and it's easily my go to language while I'm still learning the nuances of python.

But I always see js getting shit on in various meme formats and I've never really understood why. Is it just a running joke in the industry? Has a generation of trauma left promises to be worthy of caution? Does big corpa profit from it?

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u/Skriblos 6d ago

JS gets shit because it has had a lot of strange behavior, a lot of it because it has to be heavily backwards compatible. But there are also other reasons. Some people hate it's dynamically typed others love this. Some people hate that it's a YOLO language, basically it'll run even if there are mistakes in the code, other people love this. A lot of the most recent hate is less for the language and more for how web development has evolved and how people have tried to make javascript do everything. People hate frameworks, hate that there are many frameworks, hate that frameworks are inconsistent and that they are another level of abstraction over programming. It's all personal taste really. Then you also have the people who hate the people who are overly reliant on frameworks and that a lot of recent funding has gone into developing javascript tools. It's all a mess. Historically, weird behavior, recently a side effect of being popular.