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Discussion on: Has Javascript gotten any better?

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Scott Simontis

People are overdramatic about JavaScript, but it could definitely be a better experience. Mozilla, Google and Microsoft became so obsessed with benchmarks that they optimized their engines to get record scores on benchmark tests, but it turns out none of that applies to real-world performance.

Some people refuse to accept the present state of Javascript. I fought for React so long at a previous job, but my manager thought it was too risky and would rather stick to jQuery and bringing in 20+ plugins to get through the project. I finally convinced them to let us use Knockout because one manager had heard of it, and I had the privilege of writing a 3000 line component. It was a nightmare.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people who can't see any faults. So many frameworks make reckless decisions that alienate the majority of users. You end up with releases that don't actually work and absolutely no help from the developers when you report the bug. Package management is a disaster and I find that keeping track of any large codebase is a nightmare.

I like Typescript, but it takes too long to implement typing and the typing system is not as powerful as I would like. I really like Purescript and Elm, however. I wish I had more time to play around with them, they are exactly what I want in a programming language. I am a big fan of functional programming concepts in general.