Ask HN:The Problem of JavaScript

My own tentative belief is that languages are just not that important, as it turns out. Most of them do mostly the same things, and JavaScript is not really exceptionally better or worse than most languages.

There's, alas, a tribalism about what language folks pick, and that can lead to bias & ardency & dogmatist modes, where folks want to feel different, want to have identities. And JavaScript is by far the biggest player today, so being anti-JavaScript is the most obvious shared second mode, is a target painted on the back.

> Because our technological world which is build upon a code garbage garden is already at its worst

There are definitely things not great about JavaScript, but overall it's quite competent & can be used well. I think the main issue is that whatever is most popular is also going to be poorly used & wild, amid tons of getting it right & doing well. JavaScript's other main flaw is just that it has a long history, that there's such a long arch of tools technologies & styles, and there's not a clearly defined modernized culture that has yet emerged to provide clear shape forward: esm is slowly happening, typescript is highly adopted, but we're still rapidly redeveloping the tool chains, which alas, are all too necessary at the time. (But also, JavaScript is one of the few languages one can use with zero tool chain too, which is a great & brilliant aspect of it).

Seemingly the only way we get nice neat well structured languages+libraries is if there is a Benevolent Dictator situation writing the whole platform. It's kind of a Conway's Law notion, that only a highly heirarchical power relationship with centralized authority can produce such a well structured work (but perhaps there might be other ways to evolve Big + Well Structured platforms, exceptions to Conways Law). Apple is kind of this now. The realest example comes from history, where there were Microsoft's with expansive .NET platforms that were everything-and-the-kitchen-sink top down approaches, where folks almost never brought in 3rd party libraries at all. But these are evolutionary dead ends, lack diversity & a marketplace of ideas: they may have some great parts, but over time the not-so-great parts grow, or other forms of exceptionalness in development come along & the platform is not well positioned to assimilate the new. Trying to be highly refined & opinionated & having strongly kept good paths feels rugged & enduring & well-crafted, but that assurity of strength often belies a fragility & stuckness.

I think a lot of people dislike the Bazaar (of "The Cathedral & the Bazaar") mode, want something more obviously refined, but it's been the iterative & open & exploratory nature of JavaScript that's let it lead, that's allowed it to keep expanding & serving new styles, new architectures, to do new things. The language (& it's infinite pick of options) has not hindered expansion & use, where-as many languages have more fixed constraints/restrictions (& much less platform). I tend to align towards Wall's Perl, the first postmodern computer language, as it highlights how borrowing & using & stealing techniques opportunistically enables us, and see what we have with JavaScript as a great example of what a broadly flexible competent language can do, especially as a vast library of easy-to-make modules spreads out around it.

I think there's a lot of ways to debate what's good & bad, what we're looking for. There's also a lot of historical context specifically around why JavaScript has taken over, chief among them being the technical constraints of JS being the only technical option for the only important online platform on the planet. Wasm is coming to enable new choices. Just my take, but I'm mixed on that: I welcome the exploration & am excited to see (and post-m...

0)No scripts, each interaction is a round trip to the server

1)Minimally scripted pages with classic SSR

2)Full blown apps compiled to WASM and rendered on canvas

Even if we goto 2, we still have some minimal wrapper JS. I'm not sure we can escape it at this point. The best we can do is minimize our exposure.

Occasionally, for a side project, I'll need some sort of back-end. This usually means I need to get some data from somewhere, process it a bit, store it and then ask for it at a later date. JS (Typescript in my case) is more than adequate for this, and if I add Redis and Nginx I can get away with paying very little for a VPS to run it on quite reliably.

The JS landscape has lots of problems, but I don't wade too deep into it so I'm mostly content.