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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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