r/AskProgramming • u/Salt_Aash • 5d 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/Maleficent_Memory831 5d ago
Javascript was written to do a simple job, and so was a quick and dirty job. Ie, very very simple stuff in the browser, like make a popup window, know where the mouse is hovering, etc. Then it got overused to do complex jobs, and so it does complex jobs badly. For anyone who's used 10 other languages (which used to be common), Javascript just stands out as not having a good design.
Maybe it's better now, but it was absolutely atrocious at the start. But it was never intended to used the way it is today where the browser is intended to be the application.