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Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

The over-complication is recursive too. CSS was already too complicated when it was initially written, and the main specification got so complicated itself that it has now been split up into a dozen internally-overcomplicated submodules. JavaScript went from a language that could be implemented in a weekend to a C++-like multiparadigm monstrosity, somehow without fixing most of the serious "WTF happened here" problems.

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> The over-complication is recursive

The phrase "fractal of bad design" comes to mind.. Although it was originally used for PHP, this anti-design-pattern seems to rear its head almost inevitably with popular and long-lived languages/systems (which I suppose includes C++, though I'm not qualified to judge).

I've heard people pinning hopes on WebAssembly. It does seem possible that eventually it could allow new languages to replace CSS and JS, maybe even support the development of new kinds of applications that replace (the current paradigm of) the browser as a cross-platform VM.

JavaScript is getting simpler in a lot of ways. Things that are confusing to developers of others languages e.g. function scope can be avoided by telling people to use let instead.

Also a lot of the things I wanted 5-10 years ago that I had to work around are now being included. For example there is a decent-ish http request API.

I don't like web assembly. I think it is actually worse in a lot of ways than the huge JS frameworks that people think that it will replace.

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