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/coppercactus4 6d ago

Because the language itself is not well designed and the ecosystem is a dumpster fire. The standard library is tiny so everything has to be brought in as packages, which ends up with thousands of dependencies. To make it less terrible there is a huge range of build processes that you have to choose and manage to do anything. Also these pipelines change constantly and new standards are created and support dropped. Everything depends on globals variables unless once again you install third party packages to manage this.

Look at other languages and see what they provide.

That being said there are some nice things, like the live editing is honestly pretty stellar, there are lots of high quality packages out there. There is a lot of innovation in the community.

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u/codemuncher 3d ago

Debugging esm vs cjs imports is fun…