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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

>As a JS/Web developer you learn to ignore the hatred of the web that it seems to get from the HN crowd.

As an occasional full stack developer (not by choice), I can confidently say that the reason people hate on popular web tech is that it is uniformly terrible compared to non-web tech. I'm no fan of Java, for example, but I'll take it over PHP any day. JavaScript is so bad that I (and many other developers) will put a lot of effort into using any alternative, such as typescript, purescript, Elm, etc.

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This is the typical "hatred of the web" that I usually ignore. ES2015 brought a ton of huge language improvements that are still filtering out into usage, Babel means you can use them all now without waiting for browsers to implement them, Webpack gives you a ton of flexibility for packaging it, Eslint allows you to lint in a completely pluggable way, NPM (and now Yarn, which fixes many of NPM's problems at scale) allows you to effectively manage dependencies, Typescript or Flow allow you to incrementally add the benefits of static types, and Javascript's "functions as a first class object" allow it to behave as a powerful functional programming language.

It's very possible to write--and deploy--very high quality Javascript today.

The length of that paragraph and the number of tools mentioned is exactly one of the problems of web development. It's like missing the forest for the trees. And even with all the huge language improvements, it's still no where near the capabilities and safety of non-web languages.

But I don't disagree that it's possible to write very high quality JavaScript code -- it's just a little bit painful.

It's certainly a little bit painful, but that's only because these things are brand new. These tools let you create applications most comparable to native apps, and could you imagine developing for iOS or Android without a Xcode or Android Studio? The current trajectory is very, very good, and it's with a bunch of tools and ideas that came from the community.

heh. I find the fact that this conversation happened to be extremely interesting - it's almost as if people are missing the point :)

In the real world, changing web development to give it the "capabilities and safety of non-web languages" is extremely difficult to do on any sort of timeframe because it needs to be supported AND backwards compatible in all browsers. Realistically speaking, how do you 'fix' web development? How could you make it better?

The modern Javascript ecosystem is a realisation of this and it does the best it can do given the shitty situation it's in - using tooling and preprocessing to give it some features from other types of development, like static types!

JS5 was already fine too.

With ES2015 the crowd that hasn't had time to learn JS can just write it like it's Java/C#, with the class syntactic sugar of ES2015.

"My language that I use all the time (definitely no Blub paradox here) isn't bad, look at all these random features it has!" Sorry, but that isn't a reasonable argument. Having used all the stuff you mentioned, and many other languages, JS is relatively not good.

> Typescript

Is essentially an entirely different language. But I agree, it's a vast improvement.

> It's very possible to write--and deploy--very high quality Javascript today.

But the language doesn't actively assist in precluding low-quality code, and most production JS that wasn't transpiled is low-quality.

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