Here we go again with JavaScript. Can't wait for this cycle to go back down like it did back when jQuery and Node first came out and everyone jumped on the bandwagon.
What pieces of advice do you offer so that this poor child may avoid the mistakes of his forebears?
Take two steps back and one can see the waves of hype roll through programming blogs, HN and reddit. 10 years ago people were arguing over ORMs. Then it was dependancy injection frameworks, then SQL vs NoSQL. Now there's JavaScript and it's various frameworks and libraries. THere's always so much hype about what to use that it's easy to lost in it and worry that if you aren't riding the trend wave, you'll drown. But most times it's easier just to float a while and watch from a short distance. Get done what you need to get done with what you currently know. Let the hype die down. Learning new things is a ton of fun. But they can be devilish to deploy in production. Don't feel like you have to use them.
Edit: I'm not saying DI frameworks, or ORMs or NoSQL (or even SQL) are bad in any way. Just that within each topic there was much arguing about what is "the best" or "proper" or whatever. Wait for that to cool off and die down before betting your next project on it.
Citing Alan Kay on the difficulties of keeping up with tech:
We are fortunate that most of what is "new" is more like "particular 'news'" rather than actually "new". From the standpoint of actual categorical change, things have been very slow the last 30 years or so.
I guess it depends on what time scale you are using to define computing history. JavaScript hasn't been 'new' for a long time.
I've been a web programmer for about 20yrs and have used ASP, ColdFusion, Java, C#, PHP, and JavaScript professionally and for me it is the language I enjoy using/writing the most. It continually surprises with new and more powerful innovations and implementations: from the early days of DHTML to AJAX, closures, Node, React, Tessel, etc.
I'm curious as to what more would have to be done with the language for it to graduate to 'real' language status.
Heck even NASA thinks it's good enough: https://vimeo.com/168064722