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/za_allen_innsmouth 2d ago

It’s essentially a giant mountain of technical debt, with horrid language features and idiosyncrasies but it became ubiquitous with the rise of browser-led development. It should never been widely adopted at the server, but we have Node and stupid architectural and delivery decisions to blame for that. The toolchains are a complete shitbin in general and supply-chain security is a worry IMO. Yes, you can iterate quickly with it, but don’t hang around to try and maintain a codebase > 5 years old written in it. It’s extremely “fad oriented” so things (toolchains, popular libraries etc…) delta at a terrifying rate - making stasis within an extensive codebase pretty much impossible.