A lot of people blame the JavaScript language itself but, the longer I'm around in the world of web development, the more I think that the quality of JavaScript applications is dictated by the economics of said applications.
Off the top of my head, the best software I use seems to fall into two categories:
- Closed source software that requires buying a license to use
- Open source software that is specifically made for developers and promises to do one job well
Whatever falls in the middle of those two categories tends to suffer, in my experience.
If you think about it, web based software tend not to fit neatly into either category. Most of them are the following:
- Closed source but are either too cheap or are free
- Open source but promises to do way too many things, and also too cheap or free (describes a lot of frameworks and design tools)
Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. The end users are not given a big enough reason to pay for them adequately or at all, product owners care little about quality and reliability because it's way too easy to get a zillion low quality users to look at ads, and the barrier of entry for new JavaScript programmers is so low that it's full of people who never think philosophically about how code should be written.
> Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems.
I think an additional problem with the JavaScript ecosystem specifically is external resources are extremely easy to access and their cost is usually borne by end user resources. Therefore they're too tempting for many developers to avoid. Unfortunately the runtime environment of the end user rarely matches that of the developers and seemingly "cheap" resource access at development/test time isn't cheap for the end user.
JavaScript is happy to pull in some library hosted on some third party service at runtime. For the developer/tester this ends up cached by the browser and/or at the edge of the CDN. A developer may also have topologically close CDN endpoints. This inspires them to pull willy nilly from third party libraries because to them they're cheap to access and they save time writing some utility function.
The same goes for CSS, APIs, or media resources. With JavaScript the delivery is a client issue and costs can be pushed entirely onto the client. If pulling in an external resource(s) costs a developer non-trivial money to store and serve they'll put more effort into tree shaking or other delivery optimizations. They may omit it entirely.
I think this massively contributes to the LEGO piece construction of a lot of web apps. It also contributes to performance robbing things like tag managers that insert a bunch of incongruent plug-ins only at runtime from an unbounded number of sources.
Ehh... not sure I want to go in graphic detail here, but my understanding is that term denotes cheap and low grade jetsam. I think it was a more common term on the internet back when I was in high school in 2005.
Off the top of my head, the best software I use seems to fall into two categories:
- Closed source software that requires buying a license to use
- Open source software that is specifically made for developers and promises to do one job well
Whatever falls in the middle of those two categories tends to suffer, in my experience.
If you think about it, web based software tend not to fit neatly into either category. Most of them are the following:
- Closed source but are either too cheap or are free
- Open source but promises to do way too many things, and also too cheap or free (describes a lot of frameworks and design tools)
Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. The end users are not given a big enough reason to pay for them adequately or at all, product owners care little about quality and reliability because it's way too easy to get a zillion low quality users to look at ads, and the barrier of entry for new JavaScript programmers is so low that it's full of people who never think philosophically about how code should be written.