Almost all successful, mainstream, techs are like that. From a purely technical perspective, they are awful (or where awful at launch), they were just adopted because they were easy to use. When I say awful, I mean for professional use in high impact environments: financial, healthcare, automotive, etc.
Few people would argue that except for ease of use and ubiquity, any of these techs were superior to their competitors at launch or even a few years after.
After a while what happens is that these techs become entrenched and more serious devs have to dig in and they generally make these techs bearable. See Javascript before V8 and after, as an example.
A big chunk of the HN crowd is high powered professional developers, people working for FAANGs and startups with interesting domains. It's only normal they criticize what they consider half-baked tech.
Almost all successful, mainstream, techs are like that. From a purely technical perspective, they are awful (or where awful at launch), they were just adopted because they were easy to use. When I say awful, I mean for professional use in high impact environments: financial, healthcare, automotive, etc.
Examples: VB/VBA, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Mongo, Docker, Node.
Few people would argue that except for ease of use and ubiquity, any of these techs were superior to their competitors at launch or even a few years after.
After a while what happens is that these techs become entrenched and more serious devs have to dig in and they generally make these techs bearable. See Javascript before V8 and after, as an example.
A big chunk of the HN crowd is high powered professional developers, people working for FAANGs and startups with interesting domains. It's only normal they criticize what they consider half-baked tech.