I’d honestly love to know what people are comparing to javascript when they complain about rate of change / having to learn, unless it’s just a mental bias on learning something new vs something they’re comfortable with. I’m in a new position working on python and spring APIs and it’s effectively the same deal — researching means filtering through bitrotted methods and advice over a 4-5 year period, new methods & libraries or api usage patterns, etc.
Anyone could divine some reasons for why javascript / “web dev” is so different but I’m seeing shades of the same thing mixed with personal biases towards trade offs and design decisions.
I've been programming mostly in Java for 20 years, and in the past whenever I picked up web development it always felt like a kludge. JavaScript was inferior to Java, CSS was frustratingly difficulty to lay out components, and HTML forced me to treat my application like a printable document. Tools and libraries weren't as efficient or robust. Then I had to test on 5 different OS/browser combinations and implement ugly workarounds to fix the inevitable discrepancies between platforms.
Recently I've been developing in Flutter/Dart, and it's so enjoyable. The Dart language is an improvement on Java, the Flutter documentation and online support is great, apps look and behave the same on different devices, the API and underlying code is well designed. Plus the tooling and IDE integration is first-class.
In general it seems like most native C++ software has far fewer external dependencies than JS software does. Not zero, of course, but culturally people are much more reticent to take a third-party dependency than they are with JS.
Perhaps this is because it is just so much less of a hassle to do so in a world with things like NPM.
This is what I’m talking about with this argument being a proxy against learning vs a legitimate difference. I just replaced a big chunk of a 20 year old C system this year. There was nothing even researchable in there because the vast majority was homegrown, or libraries were pulled in and source-modified after going stagnant on the 20 year journey. Same exact symptoms I’ve seen in every other ecosystem.
Anyone could divine some reasons for why javascript / “web dev” is so different but I’m seeing shades of the same thing mixed with personal biases towards trade offs and design decisions.