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Discussion on: Are you really using JavaScript?

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darthknoppix profile image
Seth Corker

All great points! There are many different technologies we use to build the web and I think WebAssembly will bring even more languages to the web.

From the end user’s perspective, the web page is displayed and their experience is good and the developers experience may be improved.

Do you think it could have a negative impact on how developer accessible JS is?

I remember my fascination with JS in the beginning was because you could see the source (like HTML and CSS) and play around with it.

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bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

Do you think it could have a negative impact on how developer accessible JS is?

If you mean do I think "using 'high-level' JavaScript tools(TS, Babel, JSX etc), has a negative impact on end user experience"

I'd say yes in terms of performance, but no for other things like consistency. So overall it depends.

The more JS we shove down to the end-user, the slower it will be to load the page. It might not matter as much as it did back at the start of the web, but it does matter. This trade off might be ok, if the target audience has a decent internet connect, utilizes modern browsers, and the code utilizes what it can to improve user experience, (PWA features for example) then the overall gain of utilizing client-side code will be worth it in the end.

In a perfect world you have a tiny SPA, that can expand based upon the user's needs, while staying as slim as possible, all while providing an excellent, smooth, accessible end-user experience. I'm not saying this is easy, or practical for all cases. But it is the goal, and should stay the goal.

Don't use Babel/JSX if it doesn't give the end user consistency. Don't write vanillaJS if it means your code ends up a mess. Don't write JS just because you want to write JS. Some situations just don't need an SPA app with all the bells and whistles.