Why is everyone so unhappy with JavaScript?

2024 has been a much slower year for JavaScript then 2023 was, but there is still a lot of important stuff to talk about here...

SOURCE

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[George-ecx]

At the end of the year they realized that they needed to rewrite their Rust in Zig

[owenwexler]

I love the DX of JavaScript (and when I say JavaScript I mean a shorthand for JavaScript and TypeScript since I mostly write TypeScript) and JavaScript frameworks, and the language and workflows are most familiar to me since I have used them or 6 years now, but here's some real talk.

Lately, one of my favorite YouTube rabbit holes has been Linux nerds using lightweight Linux distros to revive 20+ year old computers and make them usable again.

Almost always, the distro and almost all native software performs beautifully on these old computers, but there are two things that are invariably very slow on these old machines, even on a lightweight Linux distro.

The first is modern games, but modern games with all their fancy graphics and sounds running slowly on an old computer is to be expected.

The second is web apps, and this is pretty bad when you consider like 90% of web apps are literally just text, buttons, forms, and maybe some images here and there. There's no reason for text, forms, and buttons to run slow on any computer, even old ones. I'm not saying JS and JS frameworks are always the culprit here... but it is a factor worth looking at. Those of us who make web apps do want as many people using our apps as possible after all, and that includes people with old, slow computers/phones.

This is part of why anyone who cares about performance is becoming more dissatisfied with JS, but some of these trends are also explained by more people adopting these tools and becoming more intimately familiar with their problems over the course of daily usage.

[thesmithzzzz]

I've learned many languages for many different reasons in the past years, js/ts is the only one that makes me feel uncomfortable, not because it sucks (oh boy it does), but because whenever I come back I feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to study again.

so far I have worked with jquery, react (with classes), angular.js, angular (2 to 7), react (with hooks), vue 2, vue 3, nuxt, and a whole bunch of "minor" libraries like mui, chakra, shadcn, vuetify. ah, react native as well, then expo

why do I have to keep studying so many different things to do the exact job? I don't even have time to get good at any of them

that said, nowadays I work at four projects, using nuxt, react and expo. I'm hired as a mobile developer

[foxygrandpa]

15:06 Most of the negative sentiments from sveltekit are from those who haven't used it. Vast majority who used it (and used the new API) had a positive sentiment.

[jaredsmith]

I feel like this survey never really captures my pain. Been using JS for well over a decade now. Been using TS since 1.x. Been using React since 2016. Multiple incompatible modules systems. Limited standard library. Crappy incomplete half-baked APIs (e.g. Web Workers, Custom Elements) foisted off on devs as being "production ready". DOM API sucks. Small library philosophy leads to dependency hell, although tbf more of a tradeoff. Fragmented tooling, although again also a tradeoff. The core language is _fine_ and TS is frankly amazing given the legacy constraints, but I'm so sick of dealing with the issues.

[dukkcc]

i'm gonna need that electron vs tauri video

[m-ok-]

Here is a list of reasons why front-end developers are not happy.
- You stay loyal to your company and maintain a legacy framework only to be told by job market you should have experience with latest framework.
- Framework you use at your job might become obsolete in a matter of 1-2 years.
- Things are getting so bad we are using loaders again to load a simple page.
- People are becoming drama queens because not everybody is using TS
- Instead of stabilizing things they keep dumping more things on for the next release of frameworks forcing people to upgrade with no real ROI.

[iankaranja]

The problem with JS is the mentality of developers using.

The eureka moment in Web development is to say "fuck it" and make yourself as comfortable as possible at the expense of everything else.

The walls of comfort soon turn into the pits of hell.

[EmilNicolaiePerhinschi]

getting fewer APIs in Javascript is actually great, maybe we'll have time to finish something using the old APIs before having to upgrade to something new :)

[ChristophFloat]

Honestly, I am surprised that this drift to the left, this increase in "negative opinions", didn't come earlier and with higher amplitude. No matter what you are developing with what flavor of JS, it is always a huge mess that you have to somehow manage using mostly bloated tooling. And these tools do not actually remove the mess, but only cover it up and, more often than not, add to it in another place. I mean, c'mon, why would anyone put up with this for any amount of time and afterwards be happy with it?

[palyanytsia]

I'm in JS ecosystem for 15 years. I also wrote PHP, Java and Python a bit.
I love the state of ecosystem at the moment: embracing FP, TS, SSR and all this stuff.
I enjoy writing Astro, Vite and Playwright. Still waiting for something better than Electron.

Happy devs are not taking such survey, so it might be biased.

[eaglethebot]

The entire ecosystem and unreliability of the language is insane. Having to superset a language to improve its reliability (TS) is just an unfortunate and dumb scenario, the ecosystem is a mess with packages for simple shit like left pad, isarray, etc., there’s like 4+ fucking runtimes for it with some cross compat with other runtimes, pushing the language into domains where it doesn’t belong like the backend, CLIs, etc. and JSON being the structured data standard despite it wasting so many bytes for syntax, ternary chaining hell, etc.

There’s a new frontend framework every few months for something that is a small and already solved problem space; render data, and respond to user input.

React devs don’t even like js anymore and have created opt-in PHP with RSCs.

The whole thing is ass backwards.

[miketerry]

I’ve read through majority of the comments. Everyone’s really missing the real problem. It’s not JavaScript on the front is my job on the back. It has nothing to do a job. The problem is for 10 years or more now everyone’s trying to create desktop applications with an HTML standard that was never designed for. It took years and years just to get the dialogue Element. The bottom line is there is no list view an item a control in which you can up and down arrow through check off with the space bar, but every operating system for every desktop has such a control we’re trying to write desktop looking applications with a fundamental underlined technology never designed to do it. You want to improve satisfaction get the Web standards and the browser Vendors to create more desktop light components for us to use. Do you want react in angular and other frameworks, not to be heavy to download and slow to run remove the knee for Java script huge bundles, and HTML fragments create these components that never approach what’s really available on the desktop.

[justingolden]

Hard disagree. Electron hello world is 100+mb because it ships chromium. I bundled my webapp that needs to be a very small exe and used tauri and it's like 3mb. I can't have a 150mb exe file for my simple clock or calculator program. Tauri is amazing.

[sismith]

All these figures can get so skewed when the survey is only based on 10k responses

[happy-stash]

9:53
(1) "a set is just an array..."
(2) "... and transform it on each side... basically free to do that".
Really ❓
(1) It's a hash table
(2) The transformation is O(N) ... not free bro.

[brennan]

OMG, those new immutable Array and Set operation methods like union and difference are awesome. How did I miss that?

[guxit]

I also used to hate React. Class-based components were so clunky and awful. I used portable mini-wrappers for Web Components that covered all my needs and made every app absolutely FLY in comparison. Then hooks came along which made it almost pleasant, and I couldn't ignore where the industry was going. React apps (even simple ones) are slow. Every click event have a noticeable delay, I hate that.

[alexsmart]

80% of this video is Theo just reacting to any criticism towards frameworks he likes with "but look how popular they are".

That should tell you everything you need to know about why everyone is so unhappy with JavaScript. No language/framework in itself can really be that bad. It is always the ecosystem. The culture.

[CyberTechBits]

PWAs are awesome and I'll keep developing them as long as I can!