Comments by "George Helyar" (@georgehelyar) on "Why Does Everyone HATE JavaScript? (Yet Still Use It?)" video.

  1. Writing semantic html seems to be lost on every front end developer I know. They would rather write inline styles by another name using things like bootstrap and tailwind, and add meaningless extra identifiers just for selenium tests to use etc. It's a mess of flavour of the month frameworks and package hell, and adding more layers of rubbish to try to fix the previous layers of rubbish. IMHO peak JS was probably just at the end of the jQuery era, just as people were starting to go to vanilla ES6 js because of the fall of IE and the rise of V8, right before frameworks like angular and react became popular. Watching the last decade of changes to front end dev has been like watching a car crash in slow motion, and there are no signs of it getting better.
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  2. Congrats on living the dream
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  3. WebAssembly might help with this, although I think all of the terrible things that people do will just be carried over, and wasm isn't quite where it needs to be to completely replace js yet anyway, you still need a bit of JS around the edges. At least you aren't forced to deal with all the crazy things that JS does though, you can use other languages instead if you want to, like C#, Rust, etc.
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  4. Every time I have to use JavaScript it surprises me with something simple that it can't do. For example string replace only replaces the first occurrence, which is not obvious, and replaceAll was only added in ES 2021. Before that you could do it with regex, but you had to know that you had to do this in the first place. Equality is also all over the place. I think Fireship has a video with some good examples of this. Type checking with typeof and string comparison, followed by a bunch of checking for properties is crazy. Anything can be thrown, and there is no way to filter a catch block, so you need to have catch blocks that can deal with anything, without throwing themselves. The 'this' keyword is also quite error prone, and you also have to know that arrow functions treat 'this' differently to normal functions, so they are not just interchangeable syntactic sugar. The built in base64 encoding exists but is broken, so you need to use a package to do it safely. IIFEs are a smelly solution to a problem that should never have existed, although they are less necessary now. It's got a lot better in recent years but it's still got a long way to go. At some point wasm might be good enough to offer some actual choice in web development languages, and then there will be some competition from things like rust, but right now the only reason to use JS (or something that transpiles to JS) is because it's pretty much the only choice for web development.
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