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Comment by throwaway000020 | Hacker News Reader

Yes I am in the JavaScript ecosystem. I feel like I'm trying to escape from an Amazonian jungle of errors and things that don't work, trying to find a path that appears and disappears and sometimes is trodden by others and sometimes grown over, always with thorns and strangle vines, dead ends, thousand foot waterfall roadblocks. My food is running out and my feet hurt and by day the sun burns and at night there are the eyes of the beasts watching and waiting for me to fall.

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Speaking as someone with a lot (20+ years) of dev experience, I highly recommend that you switch to a more mature language ecosystem. Other than the fact that it's in every browser, javascript is a horrible place to learn how to code.

Javascript development is a total mess. Even very experienced people spend a ton of time trying to navigate that ever-shifting terrain. It's also a very primitive, clumsy language, missing the most basic tools that a developer might want (e.g. first-class includes and packages, for starters). To top it off, in my experience, the average JavaScript developer is quite inexperienced. The good examples of javascript code are outnumbered 100:1 by bad examples.

If you're doing web dev, Ruby and Python are good places to start. Pick a language where there are a core set of experienced leaders who have been working for years, and there's a small set of "right" ways to do things.

Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics. Just write the simplest possible app, without frameworks or anything. You'll figure out what the pain points are for you, and suddenly frameworks and tools will make way more sense.

Writing JavaScript and feeling you're surrounded by errors is pretty normal. It's a hastily-designed language. There's no getting away from the fact that everything is going to feel a little bit fragile. Just accept it and don't expect perfection.

Hastily designed for version 0.0.1, this is simply not the case if you are using modern EMCAScript

Is equality still broken? Are maps still broken? Is it still a sporadically whitespace-sensitive language?

not AFAIK, but I am not an expert.

Leading questions, I'm afraid. Yes, equality is still broken, maps are broken (and in new & interesting ways in EMCAScript 6), and the language is occasionally whitespace-sensitive.

JavaScript was hastily designed, has never recovered, and shows no sign of ever fixing the fundamental problems. :-(

Equality isn't really as broken as people seem to think. And if it bothers you that much, use ===. Yes, it can be annoying, but it works.

What do you mean about maps, and whitespace sensitivity? I've never heard anything about that.

Case sensitivity i'm assuming you mean the automatic semi-colon insertion due to a line break after a return statement? I have a hard time seeing this as being a reason to dislike an entire language.

Most languages have features to avoid, JavaScript is no different. Many JavaScript developers use linters to avoid the poor `==` feature. I'm unfamiliar with the argument of the `Map` datastructure implementation being broken. Do you have a reference to that claim?

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